


Digital Datura

by tastewithouttalent



Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Flower Shop, Alternate Universe - Tattoo Parlor, Anxiety, Developing Relationship, Dom/sub Undertones, Emotional Manipulation, Headaches & Migraines, Insomnia, Language of Flowers, M/M, Music, Phone Calls & Telephones, Tattoos, Teasing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-21
Updated: 2015-10-17
Packaged: 2018-04-10 17:09:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 32,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4400291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tastewithouttalent/pseuds/tastewithouttalent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"By the time Irie makes it through the front door of the tattoo parlor, he’s incoherent with apologies." Irie has a particularly unusual customer and his life is upended.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Inevitable

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Claws](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Claws/gifts).



By the time Irie makes it through the front door of the tattoo parlor, he’s incoherent with apologies.

“I’m so sorry!” is what he leads off with, dropping his bag as he trips over the chair by the door and nearly collapsing to the floor when he tries to catch himself. “My train in was late, I meant to be here on time but they said there was nothing they could do and we were too far away for me to catch a transfer, I’m so sorry!”

From behind the counter, Yuni offers a raised eyebrow and a sympathetic smile. It’s a relief even before she speaks, enough that the knot of panic in Irie’s chest relaxes and leaves him to realize how truly winded he is as he drops to sit heavily in the chair.

“This is the second time this week,” she observes, tipping in to rest her elbows on the counter.

“Yeah, and it’s only Thursday,” Irie groans. “I’m sure I’ll have another chance tomorrow.”

“You’re the unluckiest person I know,” Yuni says. Irie takes a deep breath, lets it linger to reoxygenate his overheated blood while he shoves a hand through his sweat-dampened hair, tugs his glasses off to make an attempt to wipe them clean. “Destiny must be saving up for something really great in your life.”

“Ha!” Irie’s laugh is completely humorless; he fits his glasses back on, huffs out his exhale. “Maybe I’m just cursed.”

Yuni shrugs, smiles at him in that weird way that doesn’t quite touch the dark knowledge in her eyes, that makes her look older and wiser than her actual age. “Maybe.” There’s no agreement in her words, but she’s tipping her head to the side, indicating the back of the shop where Irie spends most of his time. “Your appointment’s waiting for you.”

“ _Shit_ ,” Irie blurts, shoving to his feet and bolting so fast for the back he forgets his bag and has to double back to collect it from a laughing Yuni. “Thank you,” he half-wails, and then he’s making for the back again, muttering self-directed abuse under his breath as his stomach twists itself into a knot of panic at dealing with the inevitably angry customer.

“I’m so sorry,” he starts as he opens the door to stumble inside. “My train was delayed, I had to run here from the station.” There’s someone already inside, as promised, a head of pale hair bent over a magazine just starting to turn up towards Irie as the door comes open, and Irie offers another apology for good measure as he meets his customer’s gaze. “I’m sorry.” It’s while the words are still on his lips, apology formed easy and instinctive by habit and too-much repetition, that he really takes in the other’s appearance, namely the dark violet of the eyes now levelled on him. The color is noteworthy in and of itself, a shade Irie has seen in flowers but never blinking attention at him, and then there’s the way they actually look, the corners turning up as if in amusement even though the other isn’t laughing.

“You don’t need to apologize,” the customer says, his voice dipping into a purr that Irie isn’t sure is intended as completely sincere. “I wasn’t waiting long.”

“Oh,” Irie says as his forehead creases itself into uncertainty and his cheeks flush with embarrassment. “That’s good?” He doesn’t mean for it to come out as a question, but those eyes are still fixed on him, starting to narrow in concentration, and he is too distracted in trying to fight the urge to retreat right back out the door to level off the nervous jump of his voice. He looks away for a moment, drops his bag in the corner while he tries to steady the frantic thud of his heartbeat into something resembling professional calm.

“Have we met before?” the customer asks abruptly, tipping his head to one side. The pale of his hair catches the light, shadows shifting over the locks; they look faintly purple too, now that Irie’s looking at them, like the light is washing the color out of them rather than illuminating them into truth.

“What?” Irie looks back at the other’s eyes, barely making contact before he has to look away again and flush as dark as his own hair. “N-no, I don’t think so.”  _I’d remember you_ , is what he’s thinking, what he doesn’t want to let himself say; even without the striking eyes and unusual hair, he’s sure the intensity of the other’s focus on him would be enough to make a lasting impression.

“I’m sure I’ve seen you before,” the customer says. When Irie risks another glance at him he has his elbow braced on his knee, his chin set against his palm. “What’s your name?”

“Irie?” Irie says, voice jumping so high and so panicked it sounds like a question. He has to look away from the other’s eyes, blink hard at the wall of the room until his certification comes into focus. When he answers properly, he’s reading the name off the framed paper as if it’s a stranger’s. “Irie Shoichi.”

“Irie Shoichi,” the customer says, lilting Irie’s name into something musical and hot enough to send a shudder down Irie’s spine. “Sho-chan, huh?”

“What?” Irie blurts, too startled by this sudden friendliness to remember to avoid the other’s eyes. He’s looking now, blinking shocked at the delicate lines of the other’s face as the customer’s smile spreads out from his eyes to crinkle at the corners of his eyelids, to catch at the curve of his mouth.

“You can call me Byakuran,” the other says while Irie is still gaping. “Nice to meet you.”

Irie doesn’t know what to say. He ought to offer some kind of response, he knows, even just to sketch out the shape of meaningless answer to the generic compliment, but he can’t think, can’t untwist his throat from the knot of adrenaline-fueled panic that is skittering up his spine and lodging heavy in his stomach. He feels a little like he’s going to be sick, a little like his knees are going to give out from under him, and he’s still fighting just to stay upright when Byakuran clears his throat and -- finally -- looks away.

“I brought the design with me,” he says as he reaches into the pocket of his tattered jeans. For a moment Irie is wholly lost for context; then Byakuran retrieves a sheet of paper, unfolds it with weirdly precise movements, and situational awareness comes back to Irie in a rush, reminds him where he is and what he’s supposed to be doing; his job, namely. It’s something of a relief just to have something to focus on other than Byakuran’s lingering smile and the shadows catching color into his hair, though there’s not much to the design itself; it’s just a few curves, abstract lines coming to three sharp points. The color is the most remarkable thing about it, a dark purple like that of orchids that reminds Irie of the eyes he refuses to look up to see.

“It should be simple enough,” Byakuran is saying, reaching out to drag his fingers against the edge of the paper like he’s bracing it in place. “Can you do it today?”

Irie considers the shape, the elegant curves of it; it  _is_  simple, well within the realm of his capability. “Probably,” he allows, steeling himself to look up at Byakuran’s steady eyes. “Where do you want it?”

He’s expecting a shoulder, a hip, maybe the inside of an ankle; there’s any number of usual locations he is braced to consider. Byakuran smiles again -- wide, the expression curling his eyes into shadowed lashes so Irie can’t even see their color -- and lifts a hand to press his fingers to his cheekbone.

“Right here,” he announces. “Under my left eye.”

“ _What_?” Irie blurts, surprise too strong to catch back until it’s past his lips. “I don’t --”

“Can’t you do it, Sho-chan?” Byakuran asks, blinking faux innocence at him.

“I--” Irie starts, pauses, remembers he’s at work. “I  _can_ ,” he allows, cringing at the way the word goes high and pleading in his throat. “It’s just...we don’t usually do tattoos on people’s faces, you can’t cover those even if you want to.”

“I won’t want to,” Byakuran says, and his voice is still sweet but there’s a suggestion of steel under it, some resonance under his tone that hisses of complete sincerity.

“Are you sure?” Irie manages, his throat tensing against the pressure of Byakuran’s words and the darkness starting to collect in the eyes watching him.

“I’m paying you to do this, Sho-chan,” Byakuran says, and his voice  _is_  lower, now, his eyes are going flat as his smile fades to just a vicious twist at his mouth. “Ought I take my business elsewhere?”

“No!” Irie blurts. His hand comes down against the design on the table, his words coming out as desperately as if it’s his life Byakuran is threatening. “No, I’ll do it, as long as you’re sure.”

“Good!” and it’s all smiles again, Byakuran’s head tipping to the side and his tone sticky-sweet with delight. “Let’s get started then!”

Irie shuts his eyes, takes a deep breath, lets it out again. By the time he opens them again, the ache of fright in his stomach is at a distance, the panic catching at his spine is ignorable. His hands are steady when he reaches for the pattern, his voice level when he asks, “Here?” and reaches out to press his fingertips against Byakuran’s cheek.

Byakuran’s eyes go wider, his mouth turns up tighter at the corner. “There it is,” he says, like some expectation has been satisfied. “I knew you had to have a calmer persona hidden away somewhere.”

“You’ll need to be quiet,” Irie says, keeping his gaze fixed on Byakuran’s cheek rather than the eyes watching him. “I don’t want you moving while I work.”

“Oo,” Byakuran hums, smiling wider. Irie can feel the motion under his fingertips; Byakuran’s skin is cooler than his flushed-warm hands. “Is that  _dominance_ , Sho-chan?”

“Shut up,” Irie says, too distant from his voice to catch back the aggressive command. “Don’t talk unless I ask you something.”

Byakuran laughs once, a burst of sound like crystal catching the light, then falls silent before Irie can snap at him again, shutting his eyes and going utterly still while Irie sets the pattern against the pale of his skin. He barely moves at all, even the rhythm of his breathing dampened to a tiny motion in his shoulders that doesn’t so much as shift the lines of the pattern laid out over his skin. Even when Irie presses in with the needle to pin color under the pale of Byakuran’s skin he doesn’t flinch from the pain, doesn’t so much as blink at the occasional droplets of blood that follow in the wake of Irie’s needle. It’s impressive, Irie notes in the far-off distance of the attention left to him as he works, a level of perfect compliance he’s never seen before; between Byakuran’s complete stillness and Irie’s attention the last of the dark points is finished well before he expected, his hands coming away with the steady movement of the confidence he only ever borrows from the weight of the tattoo needle in his hand.

The nerves come back with a vengeance as soon as he sets it down. With the necessity for calm lessened Irie’s hands start shaking again, trembling visibly when he reaches out to wipe the new tattoo clean, and Byakuran blinks his eyes open as soon as Irie touches him with the cool of the antiseptic. His eyes look darker, now, their color catching against the lines of the new tattoo, and his hair looks truly violet, like the shades are being brought out by Irie’s work across his cheekbone.

“Can I see it?” he asks before Irie’s done, when he’s still wiping the last of the crimson blood off white-pale skin. “Let me see what it looks like, Sho-chan.”

“R-right.” Irie’s throat is closing back up, his fingers starting to shake against Byakuran’s skin. It takes him a moment before he can manage to pick up the hand mirror and offer it for Byakuran’s waiting hold; at least once he’s passed it off the other is too distracted looking at his reflection to keep watching Irie himself. That helps, a little.

“It’s  _perfect_ ,” Byakuran purrs, and whatever advantage Irie may have gained from his distraction is shattered apart by the low note of delight in that one word. “I knew this was the right place.”

“I’m glad you’re pleased,” Irie manages around the tremble in his voice. He clears his throat, makes a desperate bid for normalcy as he fumbles with the bandages to tape over the new tattoo. “Did you have a recommendation for us?”

When he looks up Byakuran isn’t looking at his reflection anymore; all his attention is turned on Irie again, his eyes and mouth aligned in a smile that is as hot as it is inexplicably threatening. Irie goes still, his body locking into place like he’s something small and fragile staring into the eyes of a predator, like if he doesn’t move maybe he will miraculously go unnoticed.

“Nope,” Byakuran says, and his smile pulls wider, the dark mark at his cheek curving with the expression. “I just had a feeling.”

Irie isn’t sure if it’s doom or destiny flooding hot into his veins, burning heat across his cheekbones in an impermanent echo of Byakuran’s new mark. But whatever feeling Byakuran had he is feeling now too, inevitability prickling out into his veins until he can’t catch a breath for the tension of the smile in Byakuran’s eyes.

He’s not sure he’ll ever be able to relax again.


	2. Perfume

It’s a few days before Irie can stop thinking about it. It’s not like he’s  _trying_  to obsess over the stranger --  _Byakuran_ , his mind whispers every time, and Irie has to press his lips together to fight back the urge to try out the odd shape of the vowels on his tongue -- as much as that it just  _happens_ , that when he bumps Yuni’s wrist reaching for his bag the heat of her skin reminds him of the cool of Byakuran’s, that on the packed-full train on the way home someone laughs high and bright and Irie’s head snaps up without his intention. It’s like an echo of deja vu, a few minutes of memory stretching to encompass every moment of Irie’s day, until by the time he makes it in his front door he’s so exhausted even his roommate comments on it. This is primarily remarkable because Irie has known Spanner to go days forgetting to speak, sometimes forgetting to eat other than the constant string of lollipops he favors while studying, so when the other glances up and asks, “Shoichi, you okay?” Irie knows he must look truly wrung-out.

“I’m fine,” is what he says, though, and if his voice skids high on the lie Spanner doesn’t call him out on it. He goes back to his computer, the steady tap of his keyboard the constant backdrop to Irie’s life, and Irie sticks with plain toast for dinner in the hopes it will agree with his adrenaline-stressed stomach. It doesn’t, not really, but at least he doesn’t actually get sick; it’s some mild comfort, when he’s lying awake that night staring myopically at the ceiling overhead and willing his mind into rest instead of over-detailed replay of the day’s events.

He’s completely exhausted by the time he makes it into work on Friday. The only thing keeping him on his feet is a sense of responsibility, that and the absurd frisson of hope in him too ridiculous for Irie to even acknowledge to himself. It was one job, after all, a simple enough tattoo, there’s no reason for Byakuran to come by again for a touch-up or to offer any kind of thanks beyond what he already expressed. In the end all that means is Irie spends the entire day waiting in a fever of anticipation that twists into self-conscious judgment every time he notices it, and when they close he is forced to admit that not only is Byakuran not returning but also that he, Irie Shoichi, is a complete and total idiot to hope for anything otherwise. Luckily he is good at berating himself for bad habits, spends the entire weekend sternly lecturing himself about unprofessional behavior and an overactive imagination, and by the time he comes back in on Monday he is perfectly calm, the only shadow on his mood a lingering sense of shame for his ridiculous excitement on Friday.

It’s on Tuesday that the gift arrives.

Irie’s in the back room when the delivery comes by. Usually it’s Yuni who handles the front desk anyway; Irie can manage interaction with customers he’s expecting, within the structure of actually giving someone a tattoo, but in the customer service role at the front he tends to get nervous and jumpy. Yuni says it’s contagious, that he makes  _everyone_  nervous just by proximity, and that’s bad for business, so in the end Irie usually stays in the back and Yuni tends the front desk. It’s early afternoon, the middle of a lull when he hears the front door chime; there’s a low hum of conversation, but no shout for Irie himself, which means it’s one of their occasional deliveries and not an actual customer. Irie isn’t paying attention to the words he can sometimes catch, is occupied in gazing blankly at the wall and trailing his fingertips across the patterns set across his forearms, when there’s another chime, the visitor leaving, and then Yuni, shouting “Irie?” in a strange tone Irie can’t quite identify.

It’s startling, to be called out of his almost-reverie; Irie jolts at the sound, frowns at the shiver of adrenaline under his skin. When he steps out towards the front desk his shoulders are hunched, his arms folded defensively over the ache of uncertainty in his stomach; he’s skimming over the things Yuni might have to say, weighing the possible good against the bad, and coming up pale and nervous well before he makes it into sight of the front counter.

Then he actually  _sees_  the counter, and all his nervousness goes shocked-silent with the purity of complete confusion.

“Oh my god,” he says. His feet stop of their own accord, strand him wide-eyed and staring in the hallway. “What  _is_  that?”

“A gift,” Yuni answers. She’s looking back at him, her mouth taut at the corner with what Irie suspects is laughter.

“Oh my god,” Irie says again, and comes forward the rest of the way to the counter. There’s not much of a counter to be seen; it’s dominated by the absolutely enormous bouquet set atop it, blossoms cascading over each other into a waterfall of petals that look more liquid than floral. There’s a spicy scent in the air, like perfume or the scent of expensive soap, and when Irie reaches out to brush his fingers against the white of one of the flowers the texture is creamy-soft to the touch.

He almost doesn’t ask. The bouquet is all whites and purples, wide-open white flowers interspersed with streaks of purple from what Irie can recognize as lavender, now that he’s looking at it. The color is too evocative for what little resistance his thoughts have mustered, the bouquet as a whole calling up dark purple against pale skin, silk-soft hair dipping into color in the shadows of the light, but there’s no way the question will bring anything but disappointment.

Then again, Irie’s used to disappointment. He asks anyway.

“Who’s it from?”

Yuni clears her throat, careful with the sound. “I don’t know.”

“What?” That drags Irie’s attention to her, widens his eyes with confusion. “You don’t  _know_?”

“Of course not,” Yuni says, and she’s holding out a card, folded over on itself so all Irie can see is the generic gold border around the edge. “It’s not for me.”

Irie’s brain refuses to process this for a moment. There’s only one thing she can mean -- there’s no one else in the shop it could be for, after all. But there’s no reason for him to receive flowers, there’s no one who would bother to send them to him, and it cannot  _possibly_  --

His hands are shaking so badly he can barely get the card open without tearing it. Even then he has to take a moment to straighten his glasses, to force his hands into sufficient stillness that he can make out the tilted script on the inside of the card, can resolve the spikes of the handwriting into intelligible words.

_You do beautiful work, Sho-chan. I’ll come by to show you soon. Until then these will speak for me. Enjoy~_

There’s no name. Irie doesn’t need one.

“ _Speak for him_?” he blurts. “What is  _that_  supposed to mean?”

Yuni coughs again, the noise a delicate reminder. “May I?” Irie hands the card back to her, too hot with flushing self-consciousness to even consider refusal; he looks back at the flowers while she reads it, his cheeks burning so hot he can feel the flush creeping down the back of his neck.

“Oh,” she says, finally, a clear note of understanding, and Irie has to look even if he’s blushing so hard he expects his glasses to fog. Yuni does him the favor of not looking at him; she reaches out instead, touches one of the spots of purple in the mass of flowers. “This is lavender.” Another motion, her hand going wide to gesture at the rest of the soft white. “And this is all anemone, I think.”

“What does that  _mean_?” Irie asks, the words dipping into a plea. He could look it up himself -- he knows vaguely about flower symbolism, if nothing beyond the most basic elements -- but he’s not sure he can move, wouldn’t trust himself to stay upright if he weren’t clinging to the edge of the counter with white-knuckled desperation.

“They can mean a lot of things,” Yuni allows, still touching the edge of the anemone. “Anemones can be anticipation, or unfading love.”

“ _Anticipation_?” Irie wails. “Anticipation for  _what_?”

“And lavender.” She hesitates, glances at him sideways. “Devotion or distrust.” A dark eyebrow comes up, her head tips to the side so her hair swings against her shoulder. “It’s complicated for just two flowers.”

“How do you know that?” Irie asks, because it seems easier than admitting that  _complicated_  seems like precisely the right word to describe his reaction to Byakuran, easier than trying to resist the swell of heat in his chest at  _devotion_  and  _unfading love_.

“I was really into the language of flowers when I was younger,” Yuni says. She reaches out for the bouquet, lifts it by a vase rendered invisible by the profusion of blooms dipping over the edges. “My mom and I used to make little bouquets for each other. It was like a secret code between us.” She holds out the bouquet; Irie stares at it like it’s a bomb. “Here.” He would swear there’s amusement under her voice, the faint suggestion of laughter beneath the usual calm clarity of her tone. “You should take these. They’re for you.”

“I can’t keep them in the room back there,” Irie protests, but he reaches out to take the vase anyway. The petals brush against his arms like the flowers are kissing the ink under his skin. “There’s not enough  _space_.”

Yuni looks out at the front lobby. “Here,” she announces, maneuvers around Irie and his burden so she can step out to the low table holding the printed books of Irie’s past work. She stacks them into a pile instead of spread out, gestures Irie over. “Put them here.”

Irie does. The vase clicks against the table, the flowers rustling as he sets them down. There’s another burst of lavender perfume into the air, catching and clinging to Irie’s skin even when he draws away to retreat behind the counter.

“They’re pretty,” Yuni observes. She’s smiling when she looks back at Irie, her eyes gone dark with unspoken knowledge. Irie flinches, backs away down the hallway.

“Yeah,” he says, turns to make his retreat. “They’re beautiful.”

His hands smell like lavender for the rest of the day.


	3. Dizzy

Irie doesn’t hear the voices until he’s halfway down the hallway.

He’s not paying a lot of attention; he has other things on his mind, between the design he’s been sketching all morning and the program Spanner’s been working on with intermittent assistance from Irie himself. And there’s the distraction of the lavender from yesterday’s bouquet, the scent still sharp and startling in the enclosed space of the shop, so by the time Irie realizes Yuni is talking to someone it’s too late to double back. Besides, it’s his lunch break, and since his alarm didn’t go off in time for him to make lunch this morning he’ll have to slip past the conversation in order to buy himself something to eat. It’s not a big deal, not worth the dip of panic in his blood when he considers it, and he’s frowning at the floor in front of his feet, trying to reason himself into mature calm about the situation as he comes around the corner and can make out the actual words being spoken.

“It’s been a while, then?” An unfamiliar voice, masculine if higher than Irie usually hears, lilting with the suggestion of an untraceable accent.

“A few years.” Yuni, this time, with the careful cadence of her professional demeanor. Irie doesn’t need to look up to know she’ll be smiling, polite and friendly and barely distant as she always is with customers, but he looks up anyway, taking advantage of the distraction of conversation to take stock of the situation.

He stops walking, his feet slowing to stop him in the hallway as his eyes go wide with disbelief. It’s not that he doesn’t recognize the figure leaning over the counter, giving Yuni a bright smile that somehow manages to dodge any suggestion of real warmth; between the halo of pale hair and the dark tattoo under the left eye Irie’s fairly sure this particular individual is wholly unmistakeable. It’s that his body just decides to slow to a halt, his stomach dropping and his heart tightening at once until he can’t breathe and feels like he’s falling at the same time.

He doesn’t know how long he stands there. It’s long enough for him to see the way Byakuran’s eyes are curling up around the shape of his smile, long enough for the shape of pleasure in the other’s expression to chill Irie’s veins with the awareness that it’s not for  _him_ , that the flirtateous purr in his voice isn’t reserved for Irie’s ears alone. It’s a stupid thing to cringe back from -- Irie doesn’t even know him, really, he has no claim to friendship or anything else -- but he’s still flinching, still drawing back and thinking of retreating back down the hall unseen, when Byakuran looks towards him and the option removes itself.

“Sho-chan!” Byakuran chirps, high and bright and sounding so  _delighted_  Irie’s stomach drops again, the shape of jealousy turning into freefall adrenaline again. He doesn’t wait for a response, is stepping around the counter as easily as if he has any right to do so, and then he’s close,  _too_  close, all Irie can see is the shadow of his eyes and the white of his smile.

“I came to show you my tattoo,” Byakuran says. There are fingers at Irie’s wrist, a hold pressing in against his fluttering pulse, and it doesn’t  _feel_  overtight but it holds him where he is when he tries to step backwards without thinking. Byakuran’s watching him, his eyes wide and focused, and Irie can’t breathe and can’t quite think straight. Pale fingers come up into his periphery, just in the myopic blur at the edge of Irie’s glasses, and for a wild moment Irie is sure Byakuran is going to touch him, that there will be fingers in his hair or pressing against the back of his neck and he doesn’t know what he’ll do then. But they pull away instead, Byakuran touching his fingertips to the dark points under his eye instead, and Irie gasps a breath so startled it’s audible as Byakuran tips his head and smiles.

“Doesn’t it look good, Sho-chan?” His hand tightens at Irie’s wrist, his fingers fitting between the bones of the other’s arm; Irie looks at the tattoo, because it’s safer than either Byakuran’s eyes or his smile, easier to rationally consider the clean lines of his own work dark on the other’s skin.

“Y-yeah,” he manages after a moment, once he’s cleared his throat of the knot of adrenaline trying to choke him into dizziness. “Yeah, it looks good.”

Byakuran’s smile catches the corners of his eyes. “You did well,” he says, a adult praising a child’s school project, and his hand is gone, he’s turning away and moving back towards the lobby before Irie can catch his breath. Yuni is still at the counter but Byakuran moves right past her, out to the cascade of pale flowers set on the lobby table.

“Sho-chan, I’m hurt,” he announces, his tone showing no indication at all of said hurt. He’s tugging a flower free, twirling it between his fingers as Irie stares from the shadows of the hallway. “The flowers are for  _you_ , not the shop.”

“I,” Irie says, stops as his chest tries to swell and tighten at the same time. “There’s no space in the back room for them.”

Byakuran glances back over his shoulder, a quick cut of purple eyes that makes Irie flinch like it’s a threat. “And you didn’t want to take them home?” He’s turning back, fitting the flower in his hand back into the mass with as much care as if its absence can be seen amid the profusion. “I put it together to remind you of me, you know.”

“I take the train, it’s--” Irie starts before his protest flags and fails, outstripped by the meaning of Byakuran’s words. “ _You_  put it together?”

Byakuran steps around the table, leans in against it so his smile is cutting at Irie through the haze of violet and white. “Of course. I work at the flower shop a few blocks away.” He twists the vase, sends the flowers shuddering into motion with the movement. “What did you  _think_  I did for a living, Sho-chan?”

Irie doesn’t have an answer. He hadn’t thought about it, honestly, though if pressed he would have guessed something between ‘living off a vast inheritance’ and ‘working as a professional assassin.’ In the silence of his non-response Byakuran laughs and pushes the vase back to his original orientation.

“I’ll be heading back,” he announces, straightening from his slouch and heading for the door. He glances at Yuni, offers a nod and a smile, but when he looks at Irie his eyes linger, his smile curves dark and shadowy in his eyes. He pauses at the door, fingers resting against the handle, and the smile in his eyes fades into complete, bone-deep sincerity.

“Take the flowers home next time, Sho-chan,” he says, words clear and sharp as an order. Then there’s a smile, bright and shocking, and he’s gone while Irie’s mouth is still open on a response or disbelief or both.

It’s Yuni who reacts first, exhales a gust of air that chases away some of Irie’s frozen shock. “He’s interesting,” she says, carefully polite; when Irie looks over at her she’s straightening the forms at the register rather than looking at him. “You have an admirer.”

“ _What_?” Irie blurts, feels himself go blistering hot with delayed-reaction embarrassment. “ _Me_? No, he’s just --”

“Flirting with you,” Yuni finishes for him.

“I,” Irie says, ducks his head to adjust his glasses. His hands are shaking so badly he does more harm than good. “I don’t know him at all, it’s. I think he’s just like that, he was talking to you too.”

Yuni coughs into her hand, shakes her head. “He was asking me about you,” she says to the papers in front of her. Irie thinks she might be smiling but he can’t see clearly enough to be certain. “It’s definitely you he’s interested in.” She looks at Irie again, tips her head to the side. “Are you okay? You look like you’ve forgotten which way is up.”

“I think I need to sit down,” Irie says, and does, his knees giving out to drop him unceremoniously to the floor.

It doesn’t help the dizzy hum in his veins.


	4. Research

“What are you doing?”

Irie isn’t expecting the question. He’s been absorbed in his computer screen for the last half hour, searching with less and less patience for flower pictures in the search field, and the sudden presence of another human being over his shoulder is enough to jolt his entire tension-wracked body like he’s been electrocuted.

“ _Jesus_ ,” he gasps, his foot jerking to kick the leg of the fragile coffee table and tipping everything on it precariously sideways. The weight of the vase filled with flowers teeters, hesitates, and then starts to fall; Irie lunges for it, tipping forward and off the couch to bruise his knee at the edge of the table. The impact makes him shout in reaction to the pain but he still gets a hand out in time to catch at the tipping vase, to shove it back upright and balanced at the edge of the table. He doesn’t think about the way his headphones tug at his laptop until his motion is stilled and he realizes the cord is hanging loose instead of plugged in; when he looks over his shoulder Spanner’s collapsed halfway over the couch, perpetual lollipop still in his mouth and hands safely cradling the edge of the computer.

“You startled me,” Irie whines, just in case this wasn’t perfectly obvious from the flurry of adrenaline-soaked movement. He steadies his balance, pushes the vase in closer to the center of the table, and by the time he’s ready to unbend his bruise-aching knees Spanner has oriented himself in more ordinary fashion at the other end of the couch and is repositioning the laptop firmly in the center of the table.

“Sorry,” Spanner says, but he’s not looking at Irie, has the glaze of curiosity in his eyes that says he’s not really listening to anything anyway. “What is that?”

Irie follows his pointing finger to the vase, the sprays of white and purple tumbling over the edges. When he sighs it’s weighted heavy and exhausted with the stress that seems to have set up permanent residence in his blood.

“It’s a bouquet,” he says, reaches out to twist the vase. The flowers shift with the motion, the petals brushing the lines of ink that run down the backs of his wrists to his hands. “A gift.”

“Is it from that flower guy?” Spanner asks, picking up a trace of excitement at the back of his voice.

Irie’s forehead creases, his throat tightening so his exhale comes out as a sigh without any intention on his part. “Yeah.”

“Huh.” Spanner tips his head to consider the flowers, the sprays of purple and white and notes of pink set amidst them. “He really likes you, doesn’t he?”

“I don’t  _know_ ,” Irie wails, his voice catching into the shrill range that is apparently ordinary when speaking of Byakuran. “He keeps sending me flowers and I don’t know  _why_.”

“Hm.” Spanner reaches out, this time, touches the dusty pink petals of the smaller flowers in the bouquet. “What does this one mean?”

Irie ducks his head, shuts his eyes for a minute; when he tugs his glasses off he can press the palms of his hands against the burn of his eyes, ease some of the stress-dry ache behind them. “I don’t know,” he admits to the darkness of his shut eyes. “I was trying to look them up but I can’t figure out what those ones are.”

“What about the others?” Spanner asks. Irie can hear him rustling the leaves, tugging flowers up like he’s trying to determine how the bouquet is constructed, like that will give some insight to its symbolic meaning.

“Lilacs,” Irie says, moves his hands and replaces his glasses. It doesn’t really help, but there’s no point in hiding behind his hands forever. “The white and purple both.”

“What do those mean?”

Irie pushes his glasses up higher, blinks himself into focus on his roommate’s features. His voice has the telltale catch of true interest, his mouth is curving around an unconscious smile; if Irie weren’t so tight-wound with anxiety he might even appreciate the rarity of Spanner being this excited about something not composed of metal and circuitry.

“It’s something about youthfulness,” Irie says, tipping back against the couch while Spanner leans over the table to peer at the array of the flowers before them. The room is smelling faintly sweet, now, the lilacs less overpowering than the lavender from the first bouquet but still clinging to the air, working their way into Irie’s lungs with each breath. “Innocence, I think, and remembrance, or memories, I don’t remember which one.”

“But you don’t know him,” Spanner points out. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“None of them do,” Irie says. He pulls his feet up onto the edge of the couch, wraps his arms around his legs and presses his chin to the top of his knees. “The purple lilacs are supposed to be--” He can feel his cheeks darkening, his throat closing up on self-conscious. “First love.”

Spanner glances at him, a pale eyebrow drawing up over blue eyes. “Wasn’t the other one all about love too?”

“It wasn’t!” Irie protests, reaches up to rumple a hand through his hair. “Not really, it was all mixed up. “It was supposed to mean expectation, but then also devotion, but then distrust too. None of it makes any  _sense_.”

“You don’t know what these ones are?” Spanner asks, turning back to the bouquet as Irie’s voice jumps high and desperate again.

Other than the lilacs there’s just the pink flowers, each with six pale petals arrayed around the center. They look oddly fragile next to the larger spikes of the lilacs, like they’ve been added almost as an afterthought; Irie reaches out to touch one, brushes the fragile petals between his fingers.

“No.” Irie sighs, lets his hand fall. “I was trying to figure it out when you came in.”

“Hold on a minute,” Spanner says. “I’m going to use your computer.” And he’s gone, hunching in over the edge of the coffee table with the slumped shoulders and glazed consideration of complete focus. Irie can barely make out the rhythm of his individual keystrokes from how quickly his fingers are moving; it’s soothing, in a way, a pleasant pattern urging him to tip his head back against the couch and try to breathe himself back into a state of calm. It doesn’t work entirely -- he can still smell the flowers with every breath he takes -- but it helps a little, the familiarity of his apartment and the sound of Spanner’s typing only occasionally interrupted by the click of his lollipop at his teeth as he shifts the candy across his mouth.

“Here,” he says after a period of time Irie suspects to be precisely one minute. Irie opens his eyes, leans forward on the couch to blink at the laptop screen, and there it is: six pink petals, the photograph a perfect match for the flowers in the bouquet in front of him.

“ _There_ ,” he says, the word snapping from him with as much adrenaline as if the image on the screen might disappear at any moment. “Yes, that, that’s it, what’s it called?”

“It’s a  _zephyranthes_ \--” Spanner starts, and Irie reaches out to tug the laptop out of his hands directly.

“Not the scientific name,”he says. “The  _common_  name, it’s…”  _Rainflower_ , the site says, an ordinary enough name for something Irie has been struggling with since he got home. He closes out of the search, retreats back to the flower symbolism site he’s well on his way to memorizing, scrolls all the way down the page to the  _R_ s.

“Okay,” he says aloud. “Rainflower, that’s--”

“Here,” Spanner announces, reaches out to point at the entry. He’s tipped in close enough to read over Irie’s shoulder, both of them skimming over the words associated with the name.

It doesn’t make any more sense than anything else Irie’s looked up.  _I love you back_  seems straightforward enough, if a little out-of-place given the implication it bears on Irie’s own feelings.  _I must atone for my sins_  makes no sense at all, and then  _I will never forget you_  feels too weighted for someone he’s met only a handful of days ago. It’s nothing like the magical explanation Irie was hoping for, the meaning just as muddled as everything else; he groans, falls back on the couch to gaze exhausted frustration at the ceiling.

“Huh,” Spanner says again. There’s the click of his lollipop again; when he speaks again it sounds very nearly like he’s smiling and fighting to hold the expression back. “Sounds like he’s really into you, Shoichi.”

Irie isn’t sure where Spanner is getting the evidence for this statement, isn’t completely sure he’s not being teased by his roommate as thoroughly as he is -- clearly -- being teased by Byakuran. He doesn’t have the energy to ask or to protest; he just groans hopeless confusion at the ceiling and shuts his eyes against the ache of overthinking.


	5. Locked

It takes Irie over an hour to get up the nerve to go to the flower shop down the street. He’s been fretting about it all day, winding himself tighter and tighter between the opposing poles of necessity and unwillingness until his composure is too shattered for even music to calm him. Yuni has been eyeing him all day, though thankfully she refrains from saying anything even when Irie emerges from the back room with his shoulders straight and his gaze focused like that of a man going to his doom.

“I’ll be back,” he says, his voice pulling itself into unfamiliar resonance in his throat as he maneuvers around the edge of the front counter.

“Good luck,” Yuni says, and she sounds a little like she might be laughing but Irie doesn’t turn to confirm. The possibility is enough to paint his cheeks with crimson, and if there’s one thing he doesn’t need it’s more impetus to blushing. He moves forward instead, legs working on his determination rather than conscious thought, and however panicked-fast his heart may be beating his body follows his will instead of his emotions.

It’s a short walk. Irie’s not sure how long it takes -- his sense of time is as skewed by his frantic pulse as his rationality -- but it’s not enough time for him to reconsider, barely enough for the bite of the wind to offer him the excuse of chill for the color in his cheeks. The windows are glass, huge sheets of transparency that give Irie away before he’s ready to be seen, and after that he doesn’t dare linger to collect his courage. He makes for the door instead, reaching for the handle and dragging on it before he’s had time to even look inside.

The resistance is a shock. He’s expecting the weight of the door, the glide of hinges swinging it open to his tug. But there’s no give at all, just the metallic  _thunk_  of a lock catching against the mechanism, and it’s only then that Irie blinks himself into focus on the hours posted alongside the door in elegant handwriting. It’s outside their range, enough that he doesn’t need to check his phone for the time, but he does anyway, flushing pointlessly with the weird embarrassment of trying to open a locked door even though there’s no one to see.

Then there’s movement, action just outside the clarity of his glasses, and Irie’s attention jerks up with a heart-stopping stutter of surprise. The door is still shut, the lock still thrown, but now there’s company on the other side of the glass, pale hair and violet eyes and a smile that looks like a laugh even though Irie can’t hear through the door. Byakuran raises an eyebrow, points to the card of hours, mouths something Irie can’t parse without the assistance of sound.

“I can’t hear you,” Irie protests before thinking, adrenaline curdling into sour embarrassment in his veins. He’s burning with self-consciousness again, painful heat spilling all across his cheekbones, and he wants to leave, would if it weren’t for the level consideration in the eyes fixed on him. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”

Byakuran’s mouth turns down, forms itself around the soft of a pout that leaves not a moment’s doubt regarding its insincerity. He says something else, loud enough Irie can just catch the sound of his voice but not the words through the glass, his eyes turning the murmur into a question Irie can’t understand.

“I  _can’t hear you_ ,” Irie repeats, and the flush under his skin is spreading now, burning out across his forehead and blistering the tops of his ears. His eyes are burning too, his vision going hot with the threat of stressed tears to match the anxiety straining his voice. “Byakuran, I--”

A hand comes up, a palm gesturing him to instant silence; it’s only for a moment, just a breath of hesitation, but by the time Irie has fought back the impulse and opened his mouth to continue Byakuran isn’t looking at him anymore. He’s watching the door handle instead, doing something with the lock, and then there’s a telltale  _click_ , and the door starts to swing open as Irie stumbles backwards and out of range of its motion.

“Can’t you read lips, Sho-chan?” is Byakuran’s version of a greeting, the lilt of the words as taunting as the tension of his smile. He’s leaning on the doorframe, blocking Irie’s entrance with his outstretched arm holding the door open, and he smells like sugar and lavender.

“No,” Irie says, the sound not quite short enough to hide the sob of frustration in his throat.

“I guess you’ll have to come inside then,” Byakuran says, and there’s a touch at Irie’s shoulder, a hand pushing him inside before Irie has processed the warm weight of Byakuran’s touch against his shirt. The air inside is warm, hot with humidity and sticky with perfume; Irie stumbles over the front step, nearly falls before he’s caught his balance, and by then Byakuran’s shutting the door behind them, the sound of the lock turning back into place loud in the still of the shop.

“What are you doing?” Irie manages, his voice quaking as badly as his traitorous knees. He can’t take a breath, the weight of flowers in the air is too heavy to fit inside his lungs; he wants to reach out to brace himself on the counter, doesn’t want to admit that his knees need the support.

“We’re closed,” Byakuran says, turning from the door. “I only let you in because you looked so flustered, Sho-chan.”

“What?” Irie manages, cheeks flooding into color again. “I--I’m not flustered, I just--”

“You’re blushing,” Byakuran interrupts. He’s coming back towards the counter, his gaze sliding across Irie’s features with the slow grace of unapologetic appreciation.

“I’m not,” Irie protests, even though he can taste the lie on his tongue, the stress frantic in his throat. “I’m just--”

“You’re crimson,” Byakuran announces, and he’s too close all at once, he’s crossed the gap between them in one smooth step. Irie stumbles backwards, throws out a hand to catch himself against the counter, and Byakuran follows, backs Irie up against the edge until there’s nowhere left for him to go. He’s looking at Irie’s hair, now, reaching a hand up, and Irie has a moment of shocked realization a second before the touch skims across the strands. “Like your hair.”

Irie has no idea what sound he is trying to make. It comes somewhere from the tension in his chest, the frightened panic in his veins, the electricity spilling down his spine from Byakuran’s touch. He feels like his veins are wires touched to a battery, energy jolting through him to leave him helpless and breathless as Byakuran’s fingers curl against the back of his head, trail a path of fire against the back of his neck. The whimper in his throat is reflexive, as impossible to resist as the way his knees shake to make the support of the counter the only thing keeping him upright.

Byakuran’s smile is blinding, wide and white and curling tight into the corners of his mouth. “What did you need from me, Sho-chan?”

“Huh?” Irie says. His fingers are digging into the edge of the counter, Byakuran’s fingers are sliding along the top of his t-shirt collar, his attention keeps skipping to the dark of the tattoo under Byakuran’s eye. It looks almost like an artful bruise in the dimmer lighting of the flower shop, skimming the line of a cheekbone to drip color across pale skin. It reminds him of the spikes of flowers, the sharp bite of perfume in the air, and as Byakuran’s fingers slide off his skin Irie chokes an enormous inhale and grabs for coherency with all the desperate willpower he can muster.

“You need to stop sending me flowers,” he says to the print of the tattoo on Byakuran’s skin, the tracery of his own hands against the other’s body made permanent by needle and ink.

“Oh?” Byakuran is still smiling, his amused expression not so much as flickering at Irie’s words. “Don’t you like your presents, Sho-chan?”

“No,” Irie says reflexively, then, with another flood of color: “I mean I. I don’t have room for any more of them in my apartment.” It’s an easier excuse than trying to put words to the anxiety that is the backdrop of his life now, easier than trying to explain that the smell of lilacs skitters tension up his spine and the flutter of violet petals gives him a headache from the rush of adrenaline it causes.

“Hm,” Byakuran says. He’s still smiling but it’s not touching his eyes; those are dark, now, dark as the tattoo on his cheek, and fixed on Irie like he’s trying to see straight through his skin to the working of blood and bone underneath.

“So,” Irie says, hearing the way his voice cracks on the sound but unable to make the least attempt to steady it. “You should stop.”

Byakuran blinks, slow and deliberate. When he dips his chin his smile turns to shadow, his eyes shifting dark with the motion of his eyelashes. “Sho-chan.” Slow as the blink, drawling syrup across his tongue. “You assume I intended to continue.”

Irie can feel embarrassment crest in his blood like a wave, break heat over his face and shoulders and crash shivering self-consciousness all through him. Were heat alone enough to dissolve the supports of his body Irie is certain he would evaporate to join the perfume hanging in the flower-damp heat of the air. Unfortunately all he succeeds in doing is burning painfully hot over every inch of his face; even ducking his head doesn’t help, except to draw what is unmistakably a giggle from his audience.

“Is that all, Sho-chan?” Amusement is laced under those words as well, strung taunt in the gaps between the syllables.

“That’s all,” Irie manages to force past the ache of embarrassment in his throat. He pushes off from the edge of the counter, steps sideways to dodge the wall Byakuran is making of himself so he can bolt for the door. He can’t think straight, is burning too hot with the desire to melt away into nothing to reach for politeness or conversational grace; he just wants the door, the freedom of fresh air and the bite of the wind and ideally a dark corner to lose himself from his own self-awareness insofar as possible. He reaches for the handle, shoves hard -- and runs into the glass, the resistance of the locked door unexpected to the adrenaline-clouded pattern of his thoughts. There’s a laugh over his shoulder, bubbling amusement that would make him blush the worse if he weren’t already operating at maximum embarrassment; luckily the lock is a deadbolt, easy enough to manage once Irie thinks to look for it, and after a moment of clumsiness he manages to shove it sideways and open the door to the escape of the street.

“See you later, Sho-chan,” Byakuran calls as Irie steps over the doorway, catches his foot and stumbles again over the half-inch lip into the shop.

Irie doesn’t intend to look back -- he intends to escape and never see Byakuran again if possible -- but he turns without thinking, his attention drawn to the purr of the voice behind him without his say in the matter. Byakuran is standing by the counter, leaning back against the support at an angle that somehow makes a perfect curve of his waist into his hip, slants his shoulders into a languid tilt like he can’t be bothered to stand up straight. And he’s smiling, his eyes shadowed into intention Irie can read no more than he could read his lips through the glass; as he stares Byakuran lifts a hand, shifts his fingers into the approximation of a wave.

“Bye bye,” he calls, twisting the words into something heavy with suggestion.

Irie doesn’t answer as he twists to retreat to the sidewalk. The wind is chill on his skin, sweeping aside the heat in his blood until he’s nearly shivering by the time he makes it back to the tattoo parlor, the evidence of his embarrassment lost to the cold and the distance.

He deliberately doesn’t think about the electric tingle that clings to the back of his neck in spite of the wind’s best efforts.


	6. Deadline

“Irie?”

It’s a shout from the front of the shop, Yuni calling with the odd overloud resonance of someone deliberately projecting their voice. Irie’s halfway through packing his bag for the train ride home, the shout startling his music player out of his fingers to clatter on the floor. He winces at the sound, shouts back “Coming!” as he scoops the rest of his things into a bundle and heads for the front of the shop. It’s not until he’s rounding the corner that the possibility that it’s a visitor, the possibility that it’s  _Byakuran_ , occurs to him: but then he’s there, and there’s no one but Yuni, holding the front desk phone in her hand and wearing an apology on her face.

 _It’s for you_ , she mouths, reaching out to catch Irie’s jacket as it tumbles free of the pile in an attempt to fall to the floor.

“Thanks,” Irie says aloud, tries to set his armful down on the counter; he only mostly succeeds, a water bottle and empty lunchbox escaping to topple to the floor as he goes. But then the motion stills, and he can turn his attention to the phone in his hand, lift the receiver to his ear with a “Hello?” that he is afraid sounds exactly as harried as he feels.

“Sho-chan!” chirps the other end of the line, and Irie can’t explain why he’s surprised but he is, or something so spine-tinglingly close as makes no difference.

“ _Byakuran_ ,” he says, and he’s leaning in over the counter, throwing out his free hand to catch himself. Yuni has to reach to save his coat again, shimmies around behind him so she can devote both hands to the game of catch she’s playing with Irie’s belongings, but Irie can’t even spare a moment to thank her. “What are you  _doing_?”

“Calling you,” Byakuran says, like this is the most obvious statement in the world.

“At  _work_?” Irie wails.

“It’s the only number I have for you,” Byakuran says, sounding so put-upon Irie nearly apologizes out of instinct before recalling the situation and biting the words back. “Besides, I’m calling professionally.”

“Oh.” Some of the adrenaline in Irie’s blood goes flat, electricity grounding into nothing at all and leaving chill cold in its wake. “I--why do you want to talk to  _me_?”

“Not  _your_  work,” Byakuran croons down the line. “Mine.”

Irie knows what Byakuran’s going to say. He can feel the certainty hot against the back of his neck, clear against the inside of his thought, and he  _knows_ , completely, what is coming next. But knowing what is to come doesn’t give him the answer to stop it, to prevent the inevitable collision of his foresight with reality, and while he’s gaping in stalled-out certainty Byakuran keeps talking.

“There’s a bouquet here for you,” he says, and his voice is too sugar-sweet to be anything but poison. “You said you didn’t want deliveries anymore.”

“I,” Irie starts. His throat flexes tight on a surge of uncontrolled emotion, his chest aching in the shape of panic. He can’t find words, he can’t find breath, and Byakuran goes on, slower and smoother and sweeter the longer he continues.

“I have all these flowers, Sho-chan.” Lilting, sing-song, turning his name into a caress Irie can feel all down his spine. “Aren’t you going to come and get them?”

“I told you I don’t want them,” Irie says, staring unseeing out the glass front of the tattoo parlor and willing his voice to stop shaking.

“But I want to give them to you,” Byakuran purrs. “You don’t have to pick them up, you know.” His voice is dipping lower, shaping itself around a laugh not-quite-breaking free. “But you’re going to.”

“I’m not,” Irie says, but he’s looking at Yuni as she fits his scattered belongings into his bag. “I’m not going to pick them up.”

“I’m closing up in ten minutes,” Byakuran announces. “I’ll see you soon, Sho-chan.”

“ _Byakuran_ ,” Irie wails into the phone, but the line’s gone dead, the sound comes back to him flat with the lack of audience. He stays still for a moment, frozen where he stands with too many competing motivations to pick apart. It’s all adrenaline anyway, pounding painful at the back of his thoughts and fluttering breathless in his chest. He wants to go home, he  _should_  go home, he will--

“ _Shit_ ,” he blurts, reaches for the full-packed bag Yuni is holding. Her eyebrows go up at this uncharacteristic cursing but Irie doesn’t offer an explanation, just takes the weight of the bag as he fumbles the phone back into its holder.

“Do you need to go?” she asks as Irie stumbles out from behind the counter.

“Yeah,” Irie says. He pushes a hand through his hair so hard it drags at the locks, tugs almost-painful against his scalp. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Yuni soothes. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

“Yeah,” Irie agrees without thinking as he makes for the door.

“Good luck!” Yuni calls after him as he gets the handle turned, pushes the weight open so he can get his footing and start jogging down the street.

“Thank you,” he answers, but he’s moving already and he’s not sure she hears the response.

He doesn’t turn back. If he’s going to make it to the flower shop in ten minutes, he doesn’t have time to waste.


	7. Questions

The door is unlocked this time.

Irie is half-expecting the resistance again, even though he ran the few blocks from the tattoo parlor, even though he knows he’s made it in under five minutes, much less the allotted ten. His heart is hammering panic against his pulse point, his hands shaking and sticky with nervous sweat, but he still hesitates at the door, pushes gently with every expectation that it will catch against the lock. But it swings in easily, gliding on such smooth hinges they don’t even squeak at the weight, and Irie is still standing breathless and shocked in the doorway when there’s a call from behind the counter.

“I knew you’d make it, Sho-chan.” Byakuran’s leaning over the surface, tilted in so far Irie can see the hunch of his shoulders from supporting his weight on his elbows. There’s a spill of flowers by his elbow, sunshine yellow cascading from the crinkling green plastic wrapping their stems to catch Irie’s gaze away from the danger ever offered by the sharp lines of Byakuran’s features. He steps in, still breathing so hard any attempt at hiding the fact is rendered useless before he begins, lets the door swing shut behind him as he comes towards the counter.

“You’re awful,” he says, the words coming harsh with truth before he manages to look back up at Byakuran’s untouched smile. “You’re  _teasing_  me, why are you doing this?”

“Aww.” Byakuran’s smile goes wider, his eyes turning up into shadows at the corners. “How mean, Sho-chan.” It’s not a denial in spite of the pout on the words; the adopted hurt in his tone has no visible impact on the pleasure smooth across his features. “Don’t you like your presents?”

“This isn’t about me,” Irie insists, riding the hum of irritation and adrenaline in his veins to come in far closer to Byakuran’s smile than he would normally dare. He lets his bag swing off his shoulder, tosses it to come to rest at the front of the counter with a  _thunk_  that ought to at least threaten Byakuran’s smirk. It doesn’t, of course, but it helps fan the heat of frustration in Irie’s veins, helps keep his scowl in place when he attempts to glare into Byakuran’s smoky gaze. “You’re  _mocking_  me. You keep sending me bouquets and the flowers you send me don’t make any  _sense_ , and then you make me come to get them and I don’t  _understand_.”

“Sho-chan,” Byakuran says, but Irie keeps talking, the words spilling too fast over his lips for him to stall them now.

“Every time I think you’re about to leave me alone you show back up again, or you call me, or you send me another bouquet. Are you making fun of me?” Irie’s breathing is coming hard, struggling around the unstoppable flow of his words until it sounds like sobs, until it feels like his tension is forming itself into the raw drag of tears in his throat. “I don’t understand what you  _want_ , just  _tell_  me and I--”

“ _Sho-chan_.”

It’s not that Byakuran is shouting. He’s not even raising his voice, as far as Irie can tell. There’s just an edge under his tone, razor-sharp like a knife pressed against skin, and Irie’s voice dies as quick as if it’s his vocal chords that have been cut. Byakuran’s not smiling anymore; his mouth has gone flat, his eyes collecting shadows until they look nearly black, and when he lifts his hand Irie is expecting a slap, would draw back out of range if he could remember how to move.

The contact at his wrist is the more shocking for how gentle it is. Long fingers curl around the bones of his arm, tighten into a restraint no less certain for how gentle it is; when Byakuran twists Irie doesn’t have a choice but to turn his arm over, to bare the line of ink that patterns up the pale inside of his arm.

“What’s this?” Byakuran asks, his tone conversational as if the uncanny resonance of his voice never happened at all. Irie can’t breathe to answer for a moment; in the silence Byakuran’s gaze drops to the dark of his tattoos, his free hand comes out to trace up the geometric design. Irie can feel his touch like fire, the electricity wiping his thoughts free of frustration and irritation and exhaustion all together, leaving him shuddering and trembling like his body isn’t his own anymore.

“Circuits,” he finally manages, staring unseeing as Byakuran’s fingertips trail higher up his bare arm, skate across pale skin to press against the inside of his elbow. Irie’s breath sticks in his chest, air skidding unevenly into his lungs, and when Byakuran presses gently against the circular imprint against his elbow his lungs shudder into a shocked gasp. “ _Ah_. It’s. Circuits, like in a computer.”

Violet eyes come up to skim Irie’s features. The smile is back, spreading slow across Byakuran’s lips. “Do you like computers, Sho-chan?”

“I--I guess,” Irie says, too distracted by trying to remember how to breathe to answer reasonably. A pale eyebrow goes up, Byakuran’s fingers slide sideways to tighten against his elbow, and he can feel the responsive tremor through his whole body, has to reach out to catch himself against the edge of the counter.

“Yes,” he manages, ducks his head and shuts his eyes because it’s too much, the friction of Byakuran’s touch and the shadows of his expression are too much to take together. “I used to build robots when I was in high school, I do computer programming sometimes when I have free time.” It feels like a confession, like he’s giving up something far more valuable than random trivia about his own interests; Byakuran just laughs, a low purr of amusement that rattles Irie so badly he doesn’t realize right away that the hold on his arm has given way, that Byakuran is drawing back and moving sideways towards the flowers.

“You’ve been keeping track of the flower symbols?” Byakuran asks. There’s a lilt under the words, a tone that makes the question obviously rhetorical even before Irie has yet regained coherency. The plastic crinkles loud as Byakuran picks up the bouquet, fills the silence with white noise no more comforting than sustained quiet would be. “I’m glad.” His smile goes wide, turns up the corners of his eyes again. “I’d hate for you to be missing out on my meaning.”

He steps in closer, holds the flowers out. Irie reaches to take them without thinking, no rationality in his head at all behind capitulating to the assuming surrender in Byakuran’s movements. The bouquet is heavy in his arms, the plastic collapsing under his fingers to fill the air with sound again; this near Irie can smell the telltale perfume of the flowers, a giveaway for roses even without the familiar shape of the flowers.

“Do you know what yellow roses mean, Sho-chan?” Byakuran asks. He reaches out to tug at one of the stems, straighten it alongside the others before he returns to leaning over the counter, offering an amused smile up in response to Irie’s silence.

Irie can feel his palms sliding slick with nervous sweat against the plastic wrapping the flowers, the angle of his arms stiff and unnatural. “Uh.” He swallows, shifts the bouquet to get a hand free to push his glasses needlessly straight. “Friendship?”

“Hmm,” Byakuran purrs, his eyes turning up into the tension of amusement. “Very good!” His tone drips condescension, his smile fading as he pushes up to stand straight behind the counter. “Not just friendship, of course,” he says, slow on the words like he’s rolling them over his tongue. “They can mean jealousy, too.” A smile, a flash of teeth. “Intense emotion. Extreme betrayal.” Another reach, fingers flickering alarmingly close to Irie’s shoulder as he tugs at another blossom. “A broken heart, or apology.” Violet eyes come up, catch Irie’s to lock him motionless where he stands, as if caught by the glow of some too-bright light. “Undying love.”

There’s a long moment of silence. Irie’s too still even for the plastic to shift, only the pound of his heart in his chest to fill the quiet in his ears.

“But.” His voice is shaking. He pauses, swallows, takes another breath. “It can’t be all of those at  _once_ , that doesn’t make any sense.”

“Mm,” Byakuran hums. Then he looks away, up at the wall, and his expression goes wide-open in a display of shock that is the most astonishingly insincere thing Irie has ever seen. “Ah!” He leans back, steps away from the counter. “I’m late closing up, we’ll have to pick this up tomorrow. What’s your phone number?”

“What?” Irie asks past lips numb with confusion.

“Your  _phone number_ ,” Byakuran repeats, slow around his smile. “I’d hate to bother you with personal business at work again.”

“I,” Irie starts, stops. “Do you need to write it down?”

Byakuran’s smirk is enough to prickle his blood hot all over again. “No, I don’t.”

Irie takes a breath, and crushes the flowers against his chest, and gives the number. He hardly has a choice, when his head is so overfull with suspicion and uncertainty and adrenaline that he can barely remember his own name. Then he’s leaving, rushed out before he has a chance to offer protest and nearly before he has a chance to even pick his bag back up, left standing on the sidewalk with the weight of his backpack over his shoulder and a dozen yellow roses in the angle of his arm.

It’s not until he’s getting onto his train home that he realizes he never got an answer to his original question.


	8. Blur

Waking up with a headache is bad enough. Irie’s used to that, at least, has resigned himself to the usual inevitability of it; the problem comes when he sits up only to feel the pressure behind his eyes threaten a true migraine. The movement sends his vision spotty and blurred until he has to lie still for nearly a half hour before he can attempt to retrieve his phone to call in sick to work; he spends most of the five-minute call apologizing, while Yuni spends most of it reassuring him that it’s fine and telling him to feel better. After hanging up he sets his phone on his bedside table, and rolls sideways in bed, and tries to find sleep again.

It doesn’t come. He slept long enough, after all; as far as his routine is concerned it’s time to be awake and start the day. It’s just that when he moves the pain at his temples bears down on him like an impossible weight, crushes him back down to the bed; even putting on his glasses to bring his eyes into focus is more than his vision wants to bear, enough that he only makes the attempt for a few minutes before giving up on the glasses and anything productive for the entirety of the day. Instead he tangles himself into the blankets on the bed, stares unseeing at the wall and occupies himself with noticing the scents heavy in the air -- the fading spice of the lavender, the heavier perfume of the roses, the sweet of the lilac. They’re everpresent, now; Irie feels sometimes like they’ve imprinted themselves into his clothes, slipped under his skin, as if even when he leaves the original source he might carry an echo of Byakuran’s perfume with him. It’s a half-formed thought, hazy and confused in his aching head, and it drifts with him to the edge of sleep and back, drowsing through the hours of the day until the pain has started to ebb, until he is considering falling back into sleep just from the motivation of nothing better to do.

And it’s then that his phone rings, chiming an electronic version of his favorite symphony. It’s a poor impression of the way the music should sound, but it’s enough to cue the true resonance in Irie’s memories, to hum harmonies through his head that help to disperse the clinging remnants of his headache. He rolls over, mumbles a meaningless noise as he comes up into full consciousness, and by the time he’s reaching for the lit-up shape of his ringing phone he’s considering feeling something like human again.

“Hello?” His voice sounds a little weird, hoarse from a day of almost complete silence, but it’ll do; he’s not even sure the odd tone will be audible on the other end of the line.

“Sho-chan,” purrs his caller, and Irie flinches physically, like he can cringe back from the unexpected flush of adrenaline that hits his system. “You sound sick.”

“ _Byakuran_ ,” Irie says, as if the other needs a reminder of his own name. “What--why are you  _calling_  me?”

“I wanted to take you out for lunch.” Byakuran’s voice is smoother than it has a right to be over the phone; the static barely catches traction on the highest edge of his range, leaving the sound to purr eerily close to Irie’s  skin. He can feel a tingle of adrenaline skitter down his spine, back up, flicker over his skin like lightning. “Yuni-chan said you were out sick.”

“Oh,” Irie says, faintly surprised by the mundanity of the answer. “Yeah.” He clears his throat, pushes himself to sit all the way up and run a shaky hand through his hair, as if Byakuran can somehow see through the phone line. “I woke up with a migraine this morning.”

“Do you get those often?” Byakuran asks, then quick, before Irie has a chance to answer: “You need to take better care of yourself,” with as much gentle chastisement in his voice as if Irie’s well-being is his personal concern.

“Yeah, I,” Irie starts before his throat seizes up, adrenaline rising too fast in his veins for willpower alone to keep his voice from cracking. He coughs around the pressure, clears his throat hard; he can feel his cheeks flushing dark, is glad that Byakuran can’t see his reaction even if he can hear it. “Yeah, every month or so.” He reaches out to pick at the blanket around his legs, frets a loose thread out of the weave of the cloth. “It’s not a big deal,” he says, forcing the words past the nervous knot in his throat. “Nothing to worry about, I’m used to it.”

“It  _is_  something to worry about,” Byakuran snaps. His voice has dropped low again, cuts past the influence of static to jolt directly into Irie’s blood, and Irie’s voice vanishes, leaving his lips parted on nothing at all. “You ruined my afternoon plans, Sho-chan.”

“Oh?” Irie asks, faint and breathless on the inquiry. His heart is pounding, his stomach twisting; it’s a miracle his head remains clear, the weight of his headache apparently deciding to absent itself for the moment.

“Weren’t you listening?” Irie can hear the threat of that low resonance in Byakuran’s throat, the possible respite of a smile on the spaces between the words. When Irie breathes out it nearly takes the shape of a whimper before he can close his mouth on the sound. “I was going to take you out for lunch.”

The words are slow to sink in. Irie blames the pain medicine in his bloodstream, the dizzy blur of almost-sleep he’s been in all day, the fact that what Byakuran is saying is pushing the boundaries of belief to begin with; in combination they leave his thoughts blank, his mouth still while he slowly turns the sentence over, picks the words apart and puts them back together. It’s only then, blinking blind at the myopic haze of his surroundings, that the meaning hits him like a blow.

“ _What_?” he blurts, his voice skidding high as if it’s retreating back to awkward adolescence. “What, like a  _date_?”

“It’ll have to be dinner instead,” Byakuran doesn’t-answer, stepping over Irie’s shocked exclamation like it’s so much static. “Seven is late enough for you to be ready, right?”

“What?” Irie says, helpless to the current of the conversation.

“It’s not even two yet,” Byakuran explains, slow, like he’s speaking to a child. “You should have plenty of time to be ready for me to pick you up. Unless you still have a headache now?”

“What?” Irie repeats, a record needle caught on a scratch; then he gasps air, forces himself back into meaning. “No. I mean, not right now, but sometimes they come back in the same--”

“That’s fine,” Byakuran cuts him off. Irie can almost see the wave of a pale hand brushing his explanation aside like smoke. “I can cook for you if you’re not well this evening. You need to eat  _something_ , Sho-chan.”

Irie blinks. For a moment his mind clears its haze of confusion, offers the crystal-clear visual of Byakuran in his home, in his  _kitchen_ ,  _cooking_  for  _him_. Then his throat makes a sound, a weird strangled choke of protest, and he’s saying “ _No_ , I’ll be fine, it’s fine, yeah, we can go out.”

“Oh good,” Byakuran purrs, all the satisfaction of a cat given a treat. “Seven then. Text me your address when you have your glasses back on. See you tonight, Sho-chan!”

The line goes flat while Irie is still gaping through the haze of his uncorrected vision and the dizzy whirl of his thoughts.


	9. Style

“Oh my god,” Irie wails against the arm he currently has thrown over his face. “That was the  _worst_  thing.”

“Oh, surely not.” Byakuran’s voice trickles along Irie’s spine like melted caramel, thrums response out into Irie’s veins even without the visual of the smirk he  _knows_  the other is giving him. “You must have had worse experiences in your life.”

“I can’t remember them right now,” Irie insists. His heart is hammering overfast in his chest, as it has been for the last several hours; he’s fairly certain he’s setting a record for longest sustained adrenaline rush. He’s also fairly certain he’s going to pass out if this continues much longer; the only comfort is that they’re back in a taxi, ostensibly on their way back to Irie’s apartment, though he’s not at all certain that is actually what Byakuran told the driver. “You should have told me to dress up.”

“Why?” Byakuran asks, and Irie does let his arm fall then, brings his head up to fix the other with an incredulous stare. Byakuran doesn’t seem to notice. “You look fine to me, Sho-chan.”

“I was  _so_  underdressed,” Irie wails. In truth his dark jeans and logo-printed t-shirt make up his best attempt at dressing well -- he doesn’t have occasion to go anywhere that requires more -- but the self-consciousness of dinner is still flaming hot in his cheeks. It’s not helped by the fact that Byakuran has done away with his original torn shirt and fashionably tattered jeans in favor of a charcoal-dark shirt with a white vest that  _should_  look silly and just makes him look like a model. “Everyone else was in  _suits_.”

“Do you even  _own_  a suit, Sho-chan?”

“That’s not the  _point_ ,” Irie protests, but Byakuran just laughs, his eyes crinkling into delight Irie is completely certain is at his expense.

“I could have taken you back to my home and dressed you up there,” Byakuran suggests. Irie can feel his stomach drop at the very idea, his whole body flushing hot at the concept of  _Byakuran’s home_  and  _him in it_ , and then Byakuran is reaching out for the collar of his shirt, thumbing against the tag at the back of Irie’s neck. “You look very cute as you are.”

“Stop teasing me,” Irie says, aiming for irritation that just comes out shaky with nerves.

“I’m not teasing,” Byakuran teases. “If you had worn sleeves it would cover up your tattoos.” He reaches out for Irie’s arm -- the far one, and without lifting his hand from the back of the other’s neck -- to tug it towards him. Irie leans into the pull, helpless to the force, and Byakuran doesn’t lean back, stays turned in so all Irie can see is violet and lavender-white.

“What’s the point of having tattoos if you just cover them up all the time?” he purrs, slow and hot on the words. Irie looks down at his mouth, can’t look away; Byakuran is smirking, the expression tugging his words taut on his tongue. Irie can see the points of his teeth, the way the straight-line white of them catches the pale flush of his lips when he talks. The fingers at his wrist slide up, trace out the pattern of his tattoo without looking; the motion drags Irie’s arm in closer, leaves his fingers skimming the white of Byakuran’s vest. He could reach out, flex his fingers into a hold at the other’s waist. He doesn’t. Irie’s not sure he can consciously do anything at all right now for how fast his heart is beating.

“Art should be seen and appreciated,” Byakuran is saying, but Irie is hardly listening. He can smell lavender, he can smell roses, he can see strands of pale hair catching on silver lashes. He can’t breathe. “Especially your art.” His hand slides higher but Irie’s distracted by the fingers curling against the back of his neck, to hold him steady or offer a threat, he’s not sure which. “You designed them yourself, didn’t you?”

“Huh?” Irie has to blink hard to pull his thoughts into line. Byakuran doesn’t look away; Irie’s not sure he’s blinking at all, from the shadowed intensity of his stare. “My--my tattoos? Yeah, I.” His throat catches on nothing, chokes him into a cough for a moment. “They were my first design, actually.”

“You didn’t tattoo them yourself, did you?” Byakuran’s hand is at his elbow, now, sliding up higher still; the movement is pulling at Irie’s shoulder, urging him closer even though there’s nowhere for him to go.

“No,” Irie admits. His skin is burning; he’s sure that if he looked down he’d see a path of flushed heat marking out the drag of Byakuran’s fingers up his skin. “I had someone else do them for me. I get nervous around needles, I couldn’t watch while they were doing it.”

“Oh?” Byakuran laughs, a low shuddering hum of sound in the air. “Kind of funny that you ended up doing what you do, isn’t it?”

“I didn’t mean to,” Irie protests. “I wanted to be a musician.”

“Ahh,” Byakuran sighs. “That’s fascinating, Sho-chan.” He’s still smiling, his eyes still dark with something Irie can’t interpret. “You’ll have to tell me about that next time.”

Irie’s spine tingles, his blood trembling into heat like it’s resonating itself to the sound of Byakuran’s voice. “Next time?”

He means it as a request for reassurance, repetition to prove that he didn’t mishear, that he’ll have another opportunity to dress well, to attempt coherency, to behave like something other than helpless putty the moment Byakuran’s fingers brush his skin. But Byakuran’s laugh is anything but reassuring, and then his hands are sliding away to leave Irie’s skin to flush itself into chill against the unresponsive air.

“We don’t have the time now, Sho-chan,” he says as the taxi draws in against a familiar sidewalk and slows to a stop. “Unless you’d prefer I take you back to my place for the rest of the evening?”

All the air leaves Irie’s lungs in one stunned rush. It sounds a little like he’s choking and a little like an incredulous whine; either way it serves as an answer, or enough of one that Byakuran laughs and leans back in his own seat.

“That’s what I thought,” he says. “Have a good night, Sho-chan.”

Irie realizes, then, that he’s turned in sideways, his outstretched arm still fallen across his lap from when Byakuran pulled his touch away. He jerks back, snatching his hand away from Byakuran’s proximity like he’s pulling himself away from radiation, but his hands are trembling and it takes him a moment to get the car door open so he can retreat to the relative safety of his apartment.

Byakuran is laughing before Irie can shut it behind him.


	10. Assumed

Irie’s barely been asleep for five minutes when he jerks awake.

There’s no cause for it that he can tell. He’s at work, true, but he’s in the middle of his break, the same insomnia that prevented him from any effective rest last night giving way to an utterly exhausted doze for the few minutes he has free of responsibility. He’s slept straight through his break in the past -- usually it’s the best he can get, when anxiety is too much to grant him sleep at more appropriate intervals, and at least its enough to get him through the afternoon until he is back home for the evening. But now he’s jolting upright, as startled as if he had heard his name, as if someone had breathed down his neck; his heart is pounding adrenaline out into his blood, his hands trembling and clumsy when he tries to straighten his glasses.

There’s nothing to see -- the break room is still as empty as it was when he stumbled through the door, absent of even a suggestion of another presence. There’s no trace of sound either, no repeated call of his name or anything to suggest a purpose for his sudden alertness. Even as he listens Irie can feel exhaustion stealing over him again, pulling at the sharp edges of adrenaline and dragging his over-heavy head back down to the desk where it was. There’s the sound of the shop door opening, the ring of the bell over the frame telling of a visitor for Yuni to deal with; Irie leans down farther, turns his head to pillow his cheek against his arm as he shuts his eyes to the illumination of the world.

There’s a murmur of sound, words too soft for Irie to make out, voices so quiet he shouldn’t be able to hear them at all over the distance to the front. But he can hear them, Yuni’s gentle tone and another, a resonance faint but familiar all the same, and he’s sitting up, all thoughts of sleep evaporating in a moment of prescient recognition.

“Oh my god,” he says aloud, reflexive reaction to the shiver prickling down his spine, and twists to push to his feet.

The voices are clearer in the hallway. He can hear the polite cheer in Yuni’s, the lilt of amusement in the other. He’s sure of his identification now, would know that voice at a greater distance than just across the shop, and then Yuni says “I can go and get him,” and Irie steps around the corner.

Byakuran is already looking at him. Irie doesn’t know if he heard the sound of approaching footsteps or was just turning at the right time; it doesn’t really matter. Either way the end result is like stepping into a spotlight, emerging onto an unexpected stage for the consideration of an unintended audience. Irie suddenly is aware of the skew of his glasses, the tangle his hair has made of itself; he lifts a hand to it before realizing that will just call more attention to it, snatches his fingers away with more haste than subtlety.

“Byakuran,” he says, his voice catching awkward and strained in the middle. “What are you doing here?”

“Were you asleep, Sho-chan?” Byakuran doesn’t answer. “You look exhausted.”

Irie flinches, the burn of embarrassment and lingering edge of lost rest enough to turn his tongue snappish. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“Did I keep you out too late?” Byakuran says without anything like guilt or apology in his tone. He sounds amused, the words twisting into a laugh on his tongue to match the drag of his smile and the amusement at the corners of his eyes. It doesn’t quite touch the focused attention in his gaze. “I’ll have to put you to bed sooner next time.”

“I,” Irie starts as his blush expands out to encompass his entire face and start advancing along his neck. “That’s.” Byakuran’s smile isn’t faltering; if anything Irie thinks it might be going wider in time with the spread of his blush. “ _Stop_  it.” He sounds petulant, can’t help the tone even as it spills from his mouth; any attempt at mature coherency is gone, swept away by the heat at his skin and the lower, deeper flush settling into his blood, like the fire burning against him is smouldering all of his self alight as well.

Byakuran laughs, a bubble of overbright sound, and that helps, a little, at least pushes aside the distraction of Irie’s exhaustion-defenseless imagination. “You’re terribly cruel to a bearer of gifts, Sho-chan,” he chides, and Irie knows what’s coming in the moment before Byakuran lifts a hand to offer a tiny bunch of flowers. They’re purple, this time, the color rich enough to look oversaturated next to Byakuran’s pale skin.

Irie doesn’t even try to protest. He just steps forward, up to the edge of the counter, keeps the barrier between them as he reaches for the bouquet as if it will help. He’s more than half-expecting Byakuran to grab his wrist as he stretches it out; the anticipation of fingers at his skin is enough that he startles and jumps when Byakuran speaks.

“Do you like concerts, Sho-chan?”

“What?” Irie’s hand stalls at the flower stems, the texture of the ribbon tied around them catching at his fingers. “Yes?” That sounds like a question, as if he’s asking for Byakuran’s permission. He frowns, closes his hand against the bouquet like that will steady his throat. “Yes.”

“Hmm,” Byakuran purrs, sounding utterly unsurprised. His thumb shifts under Irie’s reaching fingers; for a moment it’s sliding against the other’s wrist, trailing fire and electricity in its wake. “You don’t have plans tomorrow night.”

It’s not a question, and Irie knows where this is going. It doesn’t matter. His fate is as inevitable as if prophesied; all he can do is watch it unfold around him. “No.”

“Good.” Byakuran’s thumb tightens, presses in against Irie’s knuckles. “There’s a symphony at 8:30.” His smile goes wider, touches into shadow and smoke in his eyes. “I’ll pick you up an hour before.”

“Okay,” Irie says, feeling hypnotized, sounding shaky. “Should I dress up?”

“No need.” Byakuran’s hold on the bouquet loosens, relinquishes the weight to Irie’s hold, but his hand doesn’t pull away; his fingers are sliding against Irie’s skin, threatening to wander up across the distance to the loose sleeve of his shirt. “I’ll bring a jacket for you.” Irie whimpers, the sound catching unintentionally loud in his throat, and Byakuran’s slow smile breaks into a grin, a flash of white so bright it turns his eyes to shadow by comparison.

“I’ll see you tomorrow then,” he says, a promise and a threat at once. “Have a good night, Sho-chan.” His fingers tighten a moment, fingernails scratching a burst of friction against Irie’s skin; then he’s turning towards the door, moving away before Irie can process that he’s leaving, before he can find coherency for any of the infinity of questions he has from the burn tracing over his skin from that removed contact.

“Oh,” Byakuran says as he reaches the door, turns with a hand upraised as if he’s just thought of something. Irie looks up from the flowers -- starting to tremble, now, left to the support of his own unsteady hands -- helpless to even grasp at a guess of what Byakuran wants now. “The flowers.”

Irie’s fingers tighten, fist against the ribbon until the flutter of petals goes still. “What about them?”

“They’re purple carnations and bachelor buttons.” Byakuran tips back against the door, pushes the handle to ease it open. “They’re also called globe amaranth.” His teeth flash bright, another electric smile arcing over the distance to ground out against Irie’s spine. “It’ll be easier to look up the symbolism by that name.”

Irie is left staring after the other as he turns, leaves before Irie can fumble together a lie about not looking up the flower meanings the moment he can retreat to the back room. There’s a hush in the lobby after Byakuran leaves; Irie doesn’t look at Yuni, and Yuni doesn’t say anything at all, though the intensity with which she is carefully not staring at him is nearly as bad as a comment would be.

Finally Irie clears his throat. “I’ll finish my break, then,” he manages.

By the time he’s done with a quick Wikipedia search ( _capriciousness_ , for the carnations, and  _immortal love_  for the other), he’s too shaky with adrenaline to get back to sleep even if he had any of his break left.


	11. Sleepless

Irie gives up on sleep when his alarm clock switches over to single-digit hours.

He’s been sincerely trying, lying in the dark and staring bleakly at the ceiling since ten o’clock came to bring insomnia to his aching eyes instead of sleep. His vision adjusted in the first ten minutes, the black of darkness giving way to too-clear grey haze and even the blur of myopia not enough to keep his eyes from fixing on random points -- the corner of the ceiling, say, or the top edge of the closet. He can see the books lined up on his bookshelf, even if it’s too dark to read the titles, tries to count how many of them he can see while he waits for the rest he knows won’t come. He turns over, shifts position, even tries lying on his stomach as if the unusual position will somehow grant him sudden unconsciousness.

It’s all useless. A shift in position is hardly likely to do what bone-deep exhaustion can’t, and besides Irie knows what the problem is, can tell just from the images that sweep up from memory whenever he shuts his eyes. Purple ink, pale skin, smoke-hazy color clinging to strands of pale hair. His skin itches at the thought, the lines of his tattoos aching as they haven’t since he first got them, as if the lingering memory of contact is enough to flash them sparking with the electricity their form suggests. He still doesn’t get up, lets the resignation to exhaustion seep into his blood and his physical exhaustion lull him into something almost dreamlike, a collage of memories formed of the echo-recollection of laughter and the spicy smell of lavender, his heart pounding hard against his ribcage with enough adrenaline to keep him from true dreams.

It’s almost soothing, in a strange way. With the desire for sleep tugging him towards hallucinations Irie doesn’t edit himself, experiences his memories as if they’re new-made, without the expectation of knowledge that should come with their past tense. Byakuran’s smile is just as stunning as the first time, the glide of his fingers as shudder-sensitive as if Irie’s skin is only just discovering human touch. Irie’s neck prickles with the recollection of a bracing hold, his eyes remember the part of soft lips around a sharp smile, when he breathes in he tastes sugar on his tongue. Then his memory starts to slide sideways: Byakuran leaning in closer than he ever has in reality, skin dragging over his, a hand at his hip to flatten at his back, Byakuran inhaling against his mouth like he’s stealing Irie’s breath -- and Irie jerks awake, as startled-panicked as if he missed a step on the stairs. The room is dark, still, shockingly so to his dream-blinded eyes, his heart stammering in his chest as if Byakuran is here in truth. All his skin is flushed, the back of his neck damp with sweat and hands curling to reach for something he can’t remember and...and he’s hard, unsatisfied desire aching under his skin and spiking up along his spine.

There is a moment where he considers doing something about this. It’s past one in the morning;  _no one would know_ , his mind points out,  _you might be able to get to sleep afterwards, you could use the rest_. For a heartbeat he’s hesitating, pushing the blankets down and away from his too-warm skin; but then guilt overrides impulse, fear at getting caught, at Byakuran just somehow  _knowing_  taking control to twist him sideways with a whine of frustrated capitulation. Better to get out of bed, to lean in over his knees and wait for the thud of his overheated heartbeat to cool.

He leaves the bedroom as soon as it has. It seems safer, to remove himself from temptation, and besides the dark of the room is doing him no favors in his attempts at sleep. He’s thinking of getting a glass of water, maybe putting on reruns of a television show as a background for his static-humming tired; then he comes far enough down the hall to hear the tap of a keyboard and the associated possibility of interaction.

“Spanner?” Irie rounds the corner to find Spanner hunched over his laptop, the only illumination in the room granted by the electronic-blue glow of his computer on his face. There’s a cup of tea next to him, still offering steam to the air, but Spanner’s not looking at it, is visibly wholly engrossed in what he’s doing.

“Shoichi,” he says without looking away from the screen or sounding at all surprised. “I thought you were going to bed.”

“I did,” Irie says. “That was three hours ago.”

That does get Spanner to look up, glance around for a moment as Irie finds the lightswitch to cast somewhat better light. “Huh.” He looks only vaguely interested in this piece of information. “Why are you awake?”

“I couldn’t sleep,” Irie says. There’s still an empty cup on the counter, the same one he left there when he retreated to bed; he fills it from the tap, tries a sip. It tastes glorious, soothes the sticky on his tongue and the dry in his throat. “I’m nervous about tomorrow.”

“Why?” Spanner sounds mostly bored, but Irie doesn’t take offense; it’s rare for Spanner to ever be anything but very faintly interested in anything that’s not formed of metal and wires. “What’s tomorrow?”

“I have a,” Irie starts, stops, frowns. “A thing. With Byakuran.”

“A date thing?” Spanner asks.

Irie pushes a hand through his hair, ruffles the locks into complete disarray over the top of his head. He wishes it helped settle his thoughts more than it did. “I don’t  _know_.”

There’s a pause in the steady sound of keys tapping, a dip of silence that echoes with the absence of the white noise. “You don’t know if you have a date or not.” It’s not sarcastic; it’s just flat, a statement as if Spanner is confirming this fact.

“No.” Irie leans forward, rests his elbow on the counter so he can press his forehead against his palm. He can feel a headache coming on. “He’s coming to pick me up to go to a symphony. Late, after dinner.” Then, fast, in case he’s being biased towards the evidence: “But he only asked me today. Don’t you need to get tickets sooner than that? And he didn’t  _say_  it was a date. I don’t even know if he  _likes_  me.”

“He keeps coming to see you.” Spanner’s typing has resumed; there’s no inflection in his tone at all. “And bringing you flowers, too.”

“I  _know_ ,” Irie wails. “It makes me so  _nervous_.” His head is pounding, aching pain against the inside of his skull; when he looks up he can see the cup on the counter, the smallest glass they own co-opted for the purposes of holding the latest cluster of violet petals. “What if he’s just playing with me?”

“It sounds like a date,” Spanner says abruptly.

The statement goes through Irie like fire, like lightning stabbing through his veins. In Spanner’s flat sincerity it sounds  _real_ , sounds like it might actually be true, that maybe the shadowy laughter behind Byakuran’s eyes might actually be affection and not just teasing. It makes Irie feel overbright, like he’s glowing with adrenaline, like all that he is is being remade into something better, brighter, more beautiful, something that might be worth Byakuran’s attention.

“Or he had an extra ticket and wanted the company,” Spanner goes on, and Irie’s glow turns into static, adrenaline converting seamlessly into anxiety in his veins. “Why don’t you just ask him?”

“I  _can’t_ ,” Irie wails to the counter. “Then he’ll know that  _I_  don’t know.”

Spanner doesn’t laugh, for which Irie is grateful. “It doesn’t really matter,” he says in a tone Irie thinks is supposed to be soothing. “You’ll have a good time anyway, right?”

Irie doesn’t know that either. His skin keeps flaring hot when he thinks about tomorrow, his heart stutters into frantic overdrive whenever he considers the impossible range of possibilities for what Byakuran might do, but it’s not  _pleasant_ , really, to feel like the world keeps dropping out from under his feet to leave him in momentary freefall. All he really  _knows_  is that there’s no way he’s going to get back to sleep before he has to catch the train to work.

About that, at least, he is completely right.


	12. Lullaby

By the time the taxi draws to a stop in front of an unfamiliar apartment complex, Irie is too worn out to remember to be panicked.

The music helped. Music always helps, whether it’s his favorite band settling into his ears by way of headphones or a familiar strain on the radio in the car or just Yuni humming to herself at the front of the tattoo shop. The full-body immersion of sitting in a room and letting music wash over him is so relaxing it’s almost disorienting, like the perpetual strain Irie keeps along the tight line of his spine and aching in his fingers belongs to someone else, is attached to a physical form that is hardly even a part of who he is. It’s like he almost doesn’t exist at all, except as a receiver for the sound that washes over him, pulls him down into the mental stillness he has been so lacking for the last few days. By the time the last notes of the symphony have given way to the crash of applause Irie has gone passive with relaxation, doesn’t have more than a flicker of adrenaline when Byakuran gives an address not Irie’s to the taxi driver. It’s enough to lean back against the seat, to shut his eyes to the unnecessary distraction of vision and let his thoughts wander through the harmonies blending and blurring in his head.

He doesn’t fall asleep. The ride seems short, but there’s none of the jerking shock that inevitably comes with waking for Irie; it’s just a rise back to the surface of his attention, lifting his head to blink out at the darkness of night until he can make out the lines of what is unmistakably an apartment building, albeit one showing off far more elegance than Irie’s own.

“Thank you,” Byakuran says to the driver, reaching forward to hand off payment. Irie’s eyes catch the movement of Byakuran’s fingers, trail over the liquid elegance of his movements; he’s still staring unthinking when Byakuran reaches out to press the very tips of those fingers against the back of his neck.

“Sho-chan,” he purrs, his voice unreasonably clear for how softly he’s speaking. “Are you falling asleep on me?”

“I’m not asleep,” Irie protests, pushes the door open to demonstrate. The air is cool with darkness, whisking itself along the cuffs of Irie’s borrowed jacket; he had forgotten about that, too, forgotten to stress about his too-casual clothes or whether it’s obvious to an outside observer that the clean lines of the coat he’s wearing don’t quite fit the angle of his shoulders or the curve of his waist. He stares at the cuff, catches it between his fingers to tug idly against the fabric, and then there’s that touch again, glancing friction against his skin that is no less possessive for how minute it is.

“Follow me,” Byakuran says, and then doesn’t draw his hand away, like he thinks Irie might wander off if he’s not supervised. Irie’s skin burns hot under the contact, like his body is trying to muster the prickling panic of adrenaline Byakuran’s touch deserves, but it slides away from him, lost somewhere in the haze of exhaustion and music that has settled over him. Byakuran steers him past the front gate, into the warm glow of the elevator landing; he’s smiling when Irie risks a glance at him, humming so faintly Irie can barely catch the sound unless he’s looking for the vibration against Byakuran’s throat. He’s wearing his white vest again, the dark of the shirt underneath lying across moonlight-pale skin; Irie thinks it must be silk, for how smoothly it drags against the line of Byakuran’s throat.

It’s a short elevator ride. It moves smoothly, sweeps them up without any of the jerky almost-pauses Irie’s everpresent nausea has come to dread on elevators, and even when it stops it’s a gentle decceleration, easing itself into place like it has always belonged here. The doors come open, Byakuran’s touch tightens almost imperceptibly against Irie’s neck, and Irie steps forward and into the night.

He’s never seen windows as big as this. The glass dominates the wall,  _is_  more of a wall than anything else, leaves the lights of the city spread out below them like a strange reflection of the hazy stars overhead. Irie’s breath catches, the visual more than he can take in; and Byakuran turns the light on, washes out the dark-lit view with illumination so bright Irie flinches.

“You can sit down,” Byakuran suggests. His hand draws free, his touch vanishes, and Irie is left to hunch in on himself, all his usual discomfort in his own body coming back with the loss of that certain-sure touch. The windows are too big, the space too open; everything is clean, cream and charcoal laid out alongside each other until Irie feels like he’s stumbled into a movie, or a page from a magazine, something as impossibly and untouchably beautiful as Byakuran himself.

He doesn’t belong here. The jacket over his shoulders is too heavy, the tailored seams too sharp over his uncomfortable form; his hair is rumpled, he realizes suddenly, his glasses off-center against the bridge of his nose. There’s a pang in his stomach, the sudden knot of a cramp, and he twists in on himself, presses his arm against the ache in an instinctive movement that has yet to offer him any relief.

“I should go,” he says, more to himself than with any intention of being heard; then again, louder: “Byakuran, I should go home.”

“Why?” The question comes so close it makes Irie jump; he hadn’t heard Byakuran coming back, didn’t realize the other had come up behind him. Byakuran flashes his teeth in a smile, reaches out again; his fingers catch against Irie’s skin, trail down against the back of his neck until he’s closing his hand at the collar of the borrowed jacket. “Aren’t you having a good time?”

“No,” Irie says before he’s processed the meaning of the question. Byakuran tugs and Irie unfolds his arms from his stomach to let the unfamiliar coat slide off his shoulders and into Byakuran’s waiting hands to be set aside. “Well. Yes, I had a good time, but.” His voice jumps high, tight into a knot in his throat; he has to cough to clear his breathing before he can go on, his voice shimmering with heat-wave nervousness. “It’s late, I don’t want to impose.”

“You’re not imposing, Sho-chan,” Byakuran says. Irie thinks there might be fingers brushing against his hair, the contact so whisper-gentle Irie can’t be certain even of the contact. “I want you to stay.”

“But--”

“Sho-chan.” A hand closes at the back of Irie’s neck, the pressure deceptively gentle for how unbreakable it feels. “ _Sit down_.”

Irie doesn’t make a decision to move. He just does, stumbling forward in response to the push of Byakuran’s hand at his neck; then he’s in the room, past the edge of the entryway, and Byakuran is steering him around the edge of a white couch, bracing his other hand at Irie’s shoulder to urge him down. The weight is too much for Irie’s knees to bear; he collapses, drops heavily to the cushions, and Byakuran is humming audibly now, pleasure purring up into almost-music in the air.

“Wait here,” Byakuran orders. His fingers drag up, push into Irie’s hair to rock his head forward again the motion; then he’s gone, moving away across the apartment with the easy grace of perfect comfort. Irie glances back, watches Byakuran kneel alongside an array of sleek black electronics; then he yawns, caught so unawares that the reaction eclipses his vision as it hums through him, tips his head sideways to let the back of the couch take the burden of keeping him upright.

He thinks he’s imagining the music, at first. With his eyes shut everything feels dreamy, imagination and reality blending into something softer than either at the corners; in the bleary haze of his thoughts the slow slur of violins seems apt, something half-hallucinated and half-remembered in the back of his mind. Then there’s another layer, the purring rumble of percussion, and Irie blinks himself back to some kind of attention as he tries to identify where the music is coming from.

“Ssh,” Byakuran says from behind him, even though Irie hadn’t said anything, even though he didn’t know the other was so near. He tips his head back, catches a glimpse of charcoal grey and lavender white, the points of a violet tattoo and the sharp curve of a smile before Byakuran’s fingers eclipse his vision and slide the frames of his glasses loose. “Just relax, Sho-chan.”

“I can’t,” Irie protests. “I’ll fall asleep,” proving his point by interrupting himself with a yawn so wide it aches at his jaw and prickles up along his spine.

Byakuran’s touch settles into his hair, fingertips ruffling the locks and sliding down to stroke against Irie’s cheek. Irie shudders, eyes falling shut in helpless submission to the contact, and Byakuran keeps going, dips down against the edge of his jaw to slide friction against the flutter of heartbeat at his pulse.

“So sleep.” He pushes and Irie slides sideways without opening his eyes, lets the weight of exhaustion drag him down without knowing into what he’s falling. It’s soft, the couch catching his weight as he goes, and the touch against his skin is still there, trailing back up now towards his hair. There’s some part of his mind that tries to protest, tries to point out that he can’t fall asleep on what may-or-may-not be a date, that Byakuran is still leaning in over him, that he should stay awake if only to see what happens if he sustains awareness. But once released from the strain of insomnia his exhaustion is endless, the notes of music unwinding around him easing any lingering anxiety, until even the tingle of adrenaline-laden pleasure from Byakuran’s touch skimming against his skin is more soothing than it is stressful.

By the time Byakuran drapes a blanket over him, Irie is far too deeply asleep to wake for the “Goodnight, Sho-chan” whispered against his hair.


	13. Suggestion

Irie wakes to the sound of music.

It’s faint at first, winding itself into his dreams without jarring his consciousness enough to jolt him awake. But the soft purr of ambient sound gains traction on his awareness, eclipses the hazy details of his dream, until when Irie blinks in an attempt to focus his vision he moves in reality, opens his eyes to the unfamiliar glow of sunlight through translucent curtains.

He doesn’t move at first, too disoriented by the lingering edges of sleep and the novelty of the sight to realize that he is awake at all. There’s a window in front of him, soft light turning the air around him into something bright-edged and glowing; he can’t make out the details without his glasses, but he can see the dark lines of what looks like a table within reach, the surface cool to the touch when he reaches out to fumble along the edge of it.

“Morning, Sho-chan.”

The surge of adrenaline is so fast and so violent Irie’s body moves entirely without his intention. He jerks upright, sitting up so fast he nearly falls off the couch, tries to scream and inhale at the same time so all he manages to do is choke himself into a coughing fit. The weight over his legs slides to the floor before he can catch at it, before he can process that it’s a blanket, before he can backtrack his memories enough to recall falling asleep on Byakuran’s couch the night before.

“Breathe,” Byakuran orders, his voice alarmingly close. Irie gasps an inhale, looks up and sideways to find the other leaning in over the back of the couch, bracing an elbow against the back to catch his chin and reaching out with the other. He looks ethereal in the blur of Irie’s absent glasses, composed of the dark tattoo across his cheek and the shadowy flutter of his eyelashes when he smiles wide. Irie doesn’t even flinch when Byakuran’s free hand comes out to land in his hair, to smooth through the tangles with something between casual unconcern and doting affection; he’s too breathless on adrenaline to fit any more in his veins.

“You slept for hours,” Byakuran observes as Irie stares at him. “It’s past lunchtime, are you hungry?”

“What?” Irie says, blinks hard to try to clear his thoughts. “What time is it?”

“Almost three.” Byakuran’s fingers are sliding against his neck, trailing sideways to skim along the line of Irie’s shirt; Irie can feel his skin going electric at the contact. “You didn’t move at all after you went down.” His smile slides away, his voice dips into shadow. “I told you to sleep days ago.”

“I’m sorry,” Irie says automatically, responding to the edge of judgment in Byakuran’s voice before he can process the implied submission to the other’s orders in the apology. “I  _tried_.”

“Hm.” Byakuran is still for a moment, his thumb pressing in at Irie’s shoulder like he’s holding him in place; Irie can’t make out the details of his expression, just the lack of a smile, the dark color of the eyes fixed on him. His heart is fluttering in his chest, adrenaline coursing through him to curl panic into his fingers; there’s the threat of a repeated apology on his tongue, a plea for leniency that only self-respect keeps locked into silence in his throat.

Then Byakuran smiles, so suddenly Irie startles again, his hand sliding away as he unfolds from the back of the couch. “Well,” he says, the tone layered over with affectionate indulgence. “At least you slept last night. Did you have work today?”

“ _Oh_ ,” Irie says, panic rushing through him all over again as Byakuran rounds the end of the couch to reach for something resting against the dark table. Then, as his memory wakes enough to determine the day: “No, it’s Sunday. The store is closed today.”

“That’s lucky,” Byakuran observes. He steps in between the table and the couch, reaches out to brace a hand at the back of the couch; Irie leans back involuntarily, his shoulders hitting the back of the couch as Byakuran tips in over him, his eyes going wide as the other’s face draws nearer. He can feel his heart pounding out-of-time, stuttering frantic as Byakuran comes close, closer, so near his features resolve into clarity, so close Irie imagines he can feel the other’s inhales drag air across his skin.

He doesn’t see Byakuran’s other hand, doesn’t realize what’s happening for a moment after the weight of his glasses settles over his eyes. Then he’s blinking hard, the sudden clarity of vision almost more disorienting than continued blur would be, and Byakuran’s gaze is slipping sideways, away from his eyes and down across Irie’s cheek instead.

“You have lines,” he says cryptically, and then his hand is against Irie’s skin, fingers pressing against the flush that rises instantly to meet his touch. Irie chokes on an inhale, struggles to breathe, and it’s only when Byakuran smiles wider and says, “From the couch” that he realizes what he’s talking about.

“Ah,” he says, starts to reach to cover the marks before realizing Byakuran’s already touching them, snatching his hand back like the contact of his fingers at Byakuran’s skin will shock him. Embarrassment burns over his skin, flares up to his hairline and down to the collar of his t-shirt; for a moment he just prickles hot with pointless adrenaline, tries and fails to look at anything except the level consideration in Byakuran’s eyes. His fingers are inordinately soft against Irie’s skin; Irie has a brief, insane thought of Byakuran’s thumb sliding against his jaw, slipping at the corner of his mouth to press the taste of sugar against his tongue. His breathing sticks, comes out audible as something horrifyingly close to a whimper, and Byakuran’s gaze lands back on his eyes. He just stares at Irie for a moment, eyes shifting darker even as Irie watches; then he’s smiling, hiding the shadows of his gaze behind the tension of the expression, and his hand is drawing away to leave Irie’s blush to radiate uncaught into the air.

“Come on,” Byakuran says, straightening and moving away around the couch. Irie takes a shuddering inhale, feels it filling his lungs as his entire body does its best to shake apart from an excess of adrenaline. “Put your shoes on, we’re going out.”

“Out?” Irie lifts a hand to adjust his glasses, takes advantage of the movement to cover his face for a heartbeat so his flush can cool to just blistering instead of sun-surface hot. “Where are we going?”

“You need food,” Byakuran declares. When Irie looks over he’s kneeling by the door, fiddling with the laces on a pair of boots that look like they might fall apart at the first touch. Alone the boots look tattered; in conjunction with the worn-through patches on Byakuran’s jeans and the holes lacing around the overlarge neckline of his shirt, they become a statement in a language Irie can barely speak.

“I don’t --” Irie starts.

“There’s a cafe a few blocks away,” Byakuran says without pausing. “The pastries are delicious, you should try them.” His tone makes it clear this is an order, rather than a suggestion, and then he straightens and looks over at Irie, raises an eyebrow and quirks his mouth into a smile that is as much a threat as it is amusement.

“Coming, Sho-chan?” he asks, and Irie nearly falls off the couch in his first clumsy rush to his feet.

Byakuran walks close the whole way to the cafe, leaning in on alternate steps so his shoulder bumps against the fall of Irie’s shirt. Irie’s breathing stalls with every glancing contact, his thoughts scattering so thoroughly he can’t make the least attempt to keep up with the easy flow of Byakuran’s words, their meaning vanishing to leave just the musical purr of the other’s voice.

He’s still not sure he’s completely awake yet.


	14. Helpful

Irie finds the couch in his apartment immensely soothing.

He’s not tired. For the first time in days he feels truly rested, his body refreshed enough to consider the prospect of alertness for the next several hours without the usual cringe of unpleasantness that brings. But his physical alertness doesn’t line up with his mental state, which is incredibly appreciative of the comfort of the couch, the familiarity of the surroundings, and the complete absence of glancing touches or half-heard laughter or dangerous smiles. Everything here is soft, and gentle, and after fifteen minutes of lying still and breathing deeply Irie thinks his heart might be returning to some kind of predictable rhythm instead of the oversaturated adrenaline rush he’s been suffering for the last several hours.

Eventually -- he isn’t sure how long it takes, exactly -- there’s the sound of a door opening, the scuff of footsteps against the floor. Irie considers his mental state, contemplates the possibility of coherent communication, and decides that he can probably manage some kind of greeting just as Spanner shuffles into the room.

“Oh,” he says, sounding only vaguely surprised to find his roommate lying flat across the couch with an arm thrown over his eyes. “You’re back.”

“Hey,” Irie manages, only sounding a little bit shaky. “How have you been?”

“Asleep,” Spanner answers succinctly. He’s moving towards the kitchen; Irie hears the fridge door open, listens to the hum of consideration as Spanner takes stock of its contents. “When did you get back?”

“What time is it?” Irie asks rhetorically, lifts his arm so he can push his glasses back into alignment and consider the clock. “About an hour ago.”

“Hm,” Spanner offers, sounding distinctly uninterested. The fridge shuts again; there’s the sound of running water as the tap fills the electric kettle Spanner favors. The splash of the water against the metal sides is soothing, a familiarity Irie doesn’t have to think about; then the sound cuts off and Spanner asks, without a hitch in his tone, “So did you have sex?” and Irie chokes on his breathing.

“ _What_?” he manages after he’s rediscovered the pattern of normal inhales, has swung himself around to sit upright in deference to the frantic thud of his heart at the very idea. “Why on  _earth_  would you think that?”

“You were gone all night,” Spanner says in tones of perfect rationality. When he comes back around the corner he’s watching Irie, looking like he’s considering mustering actual curiosity for the subject. “After leaving on a date. Isn’t sex what usually happens when you stay the night with a romantic interest?”

“ _No_ ,” Irie wails, retreating to frantic denial instead of letting the idea of sex with Byakuran -- steady hands, pale skin, sharp smile -- settle into his mind.

“It’s not?”

“That’s not--” Irie cuts himself off, ducks his head to drag a hand through his hair. “That’s not what I’m talking about. No, I didn’t have sex with Byakuran.”

“Oh,” Spanner says, turns back towards the kitchen. “Okay.”

“And it wasn’t a date!” Irie protests. He’s on his feet now, trailing after Spanner as he speaks, because this is an important point, he has to make this clear. “He just had an extra ticket to a concert and invited me with him.”

“Hmm,” Spanner hums consideringly in the general direction of his slow-simmering water. “And had you stay the night.”

“That’s,” Irie attempts. “I fell asleep on his couch.”

Spanner hums again, an extended note of almost-agreement, but he’s looking sideways at Irie, now, something very like a repressed smile at the corner of his mouth.

“I was  _tired_ ,” Irie insists. “He was just letting me sleep.”

“You slept until six in the evening?” Spanner asks, sounding bored but looking amused.

“ _No_ ,” Irie says, determined to clarify even at the cost of plausible deniability. “No, I slept until three.”

“Ah,” Spanner says. The kettle is bubbling audibly; he looks away, moves to turn the heating switch off and let the water cool while he shakes tea leaves into the teapot. “It’s almost seven now.”

“I  _know_ ,” Irie wails. “Byakuran wanted to go to this cafe and took me with him.”

“A cafe,” Spanner repeats, his tone so completely absent emotion it sounds more amused than laughter would.

“It  _wasn’t a date_ ,” Irie insists, his voice cracking high and desperate on the denial. “He hasn’t even  _kissed_  me.” His skin prickles hot, tingling with the memory of fingers at the back of his neck, a thumb rubbing against his cheek, a too-tight hold gripping the inside of his elbow; but that’s not  _enough_ , it’s not  _certain_ , it’s all circumstantial enough to be undone and more by the permanent threat of laughter that clings to Byakuran’s voice, like this all might be some pointlessly extended joke with Irie as the unwitting punchline.

Irie’s not looking at Spanner. He’s staring at the floor, hard, willing the threat of tears in his throat to ease so he can breathe, desperately praying that the burn of his eyes recedes before he begins actually crying. The touch at his shoulder is startling, the more so given how rarely Spanner ever initiates physical contact; then Irie looks up, and the smile Spanner is giving him is so shocking it knocks the comfort of the contact clear out of Irie’s attention.

“It’ll be fine,” Spanner says. There’s a pause; then he moves his hand to offer an awkward pat before pulling away. “I think he likes you.”

Irie ought to take this comfort as it stands. It’s reassuring to hear from a wholly disinterested party, even if Spanner’s total lack of knowledge of Byakuran doesn’t exactly back his claim up as particularly accurate. But he can feel the anxiety sparking through his veins, tensing painful along his spine and behind his eyes, and instead of accepting the support as given he says “How do you  _know_?” as if maybe Spanner has some all-encompassing knowledge to answer the question in Irie’s mind once and for all.

Spanner isn’t looking at him anymore. He’s focused on the teapot in front of him, watching the flow of water from the kettle into the ceramic with almost-complete attention that leaves his voice monotone with sincerity when he speaks.

“You’re smart,” he says, and then, as an afterthought: “And nice. Why wouldn’t he like you?”

Irie does not succeed in repressing his huff of frustration. “ _Spanner_. That is  _not helpful_.”

“Hm.” Spanner blinks at him, looking faintly perplexed that he was of less help than he expected. “I still think he probably likes you.”

Irie opens his mouth to...protest, maybe, to argue to the contrary, to demand evidence or logic that Spanner cannot possibly have. Then he closes it again, tips his chin down, and sighs out all the things he could have said, all the stressed demands that are clinging to his tongue.

“Okay,” he says instead. “Thanks.”

“Mmhm,” Spanner says. He picks up his teapot, moves towards the entrance to the kitchen. “Good luck.” And then he’s gone, shuffling back down the hall to the closed-door quiet of his room and leaving Irie standing tense and wide-awake in the middle of the kitchen as the clock clicks over to the new hour.

He has a feeling he won’t be able to sleep tonight either.


	15. Surrender

Irie doesn’t hear the knock at the door.

It’s hard to hear much of anything past the barrier of his headphones even when he knows he’s expecting company; under the current circumstances, with the apartment empty even of Spanner’s perpetual presence and with no plans for any visitors, Irie isn’t paying attention to anything but the harmonies of the music dominating his hearing. He’s not even sure how much time has passed since he sat down to work on his latest programming project; it’s a certainty that his cup of tea has long since been emptied, that the weight of insomnia has been set aside in pursuit of the almost-fugue he drops into while coding. It’s comforting to turn off the constant patter of his thoughts, even if only for a few hours, pleasing on some level to forget the perpetual anxiety of existence, and in that state he’s not listening for even the possibility of outside sound. It’s not until there’s a chime loud enough to be out-of-place with the chords he’s listening to that he realizes there’s even anything outside the space of the table he’s hunched over and detaches enough to pause his music and listen for another sound.

He doesn’t have to wait long. The next ring of the doorbell comes hard on the heels of the first, before he has time to wonder if he imagined the interruption, and then he’s moving as fast as he can manage, tripping over his feet in his haste to get up and nearly strangling himself on the cord of his headphones before he drags them off his head. He stumbles the few steps to the door, drags it open as he shoves a hand through the mess of his hair, and is fumbling over a “Sorry, I didn’t hear the bell,” before he sees who it is.

He’s not even really surprised. There’s not a lot that Byakuran could do at this point that  _would_  surprise Irie, he thinks; showing up unannounced at his apartment in the middle of the day is very nearly ordinary for him. The lack of surprise does nothing to stem the flood of color into Irie’s cheeks, though, when confronted with Byakuran’s appearance -- his torn jeans, dark boots, a pale shirt so thin it’s nearly translucent in the sunlight -- that manages to look infinitely more pulled-together than Irie feels.

“Byakuran,” he blurts, his hand stalling halfway through fiddling with his hair. “Hey.”

“Sho-chan,” Byakuran purrs, a smile unwinding across his lips. He’s leaning back against the railing in front of the door, one hand braced behind him and the other hooked through his belt loop. His hair looks white in the illumination of the sun, the light turning it into an almost-halo around his features. “Were you busy?”

“No,” Irie says, so fast he doesn’t have time to process the question. His hands are starting to shake, adrenaline surging through him in waves of stress. “Why--what do you want?”

Byakuran’s smile goes wider. “I came to see you,” he says. When he shifts he looks like he’s unfolding himself, straightening over his feet as he takes a step forward. Irie stumbles back, retreating into the apartment without thinking at all, and Byakuran steps in over the doorway, fitting himself into the space of Irie’s life as if it’s somewhere he belongs instead of patently over-ordinary in comparison to the glow of his hair and the dark of his eyes.

Irie doesn’t move from the door. He’s pretty sure his hold on the handle is the only thing keeping him on his feet right now, and the idea of shutting the door and trying to catch Byakuran in the suddenly tiny space of his apartment feels as impossible as flying. Byakuran moves in farther, right to the edge of the entryway, looking around the space like he’s drinking in the details. Irie trails his gaze, seeing everything comfortable and familiar through the other’s eyes -- the empty cup of tea by the laptop, the skewed angle of the computer from his almost-incident with the headphones, the towel from this morning’s shower still thrown over the back of his chair where he draped it and forgot about it. Everything feels cluttered, showing all the signs of being lived-in that Byakuran’s apartment lacks: the dirty dishes stacked in the sink, the books stacked haphazardly over the coffee table, the shoes left forgotten in the corner. Irie’s chest is going tighter with every breath, a knot forming itself inside the cage of his ribs, and by the time Byakuran turns back to him all he can do is duck his head and blurt “Sorry” like he’s apologizing for the whole of his existence.

Byakuran’s laugh is liquid, fitting itself into all the cracks in Irie’s defenses. “What are you apologizing for, Sho-chan?” There’s the sound of footsteps on the tile, Byakuran’s boots coming in closer to Irie’s bare feet; Irie can smell lavender in the air, can taste sugar when he breathes. There’s a push at the door -- Byakuran tugging it free of Irie’s hold -- and Irie’s fingers slide loose in complete disregard to the tension-panic telling him to cling to it like the last stable piece of the universe. The door clicks shut, a sound of overloud finality, and Byakuran reaches out, touches his fingers to the shoulder seam of Irie’s shirt.

“Your apartment is so much nicer,” Irie says, unable to bring his gaze up from the floor, from the gap still remaining between his feet and Byakuran’s shoes. He can see his hands hanging limp at his sides, even the loose curl of his fingers reading submission. The inches between Byakuran’s shirt and his hands feel like a breath, feel like a chasm, far too small for safety and far too great for crossing.

Byakuran hums. His fingers work up Irie’s shoulder, pressing the line of his shirt into the skin. “That doesn’t matter,” he says. He hits the edge of Irie’s collar, slides over it without a trace of hesitation; Irie shuts his eyes to the friction of fingers sliding against the line of his neck, tries to fight the urge to dip his head to the side to give Byakuran a better angle. He’s failing at this even before Byakuran fits his fingers up into his hair, pushes pressure in against Irie’s scalp, and Irie is just feeling the threat of a whimper in his throat when Byakuran says, “I’m leaving” close enough that the words ruffle Irie’s hair.

There’s a moment of distant, far-off processing, Irie’s eyes coming open as he works through the meaning of the words. Then the cold hits, a chill running all down his spine to weight heavy in his stomach, and when he looks up he’s too shocked-cold to notice the way Byakuran’s fingers are dragging through his hair.

“ _What_?”

“I’m leaving,” Byakuran repeats. There’s no change in his expression; he’s still wearing that easy smile, still letting his gaze flicker over Irie’s features. He spreads his hand wider, slides his pinky finger against the back of Irie’s neck. “I’m going back to Italy later today.”

“ _Italy_?” Irie says, the word sticking on his tongue, pronunciation made complicated by the idea of distance. “ _Back_  to Italy?”

“Mmhm,” Byakuran hums, his smile pulling wider to turn up at the corners of his eyes. “I have business to take care of.”

Irie could ask what business a flower shop has in Italy that can’t be taken care of over the phone. He could ask why Byakuran is going so suddenly, why he didn’t mention this before. But neither of those details are what spill over his tongue, when he reaches out to clutch a desperate hold at the bottom of Byakuran’s shirt, because what he says is: “Are you coming back?”

Byakuran’s laugh is startling, bursting loud and bright against the icy panic in Irie’s veins. His free hand comes down, fingers closing at Irie’s elbow to hold his hand in place as his other hand settles against the back of Irie’s head to brace him steady.

“Of course I’m coming back,” he says, laughter clinging to the words, and then he leans forward and presses his mouth to Irie’s.

Irie stops breathing. It seems like the most reasonable response to have, pinned between Byakuran’s hand against the back of his neck and Byakuran’s mouth against his. His eyes are open but he’s not seeing anything at all; it’s like time has paused itself, ceased to exist for Irie from the moment Byakuran pressed in against him. Everything is very calm, and very distant, and very impossible; and then Byakuran hums over his mouth, and presses in harder, and gravity drops itself cleanly away from Irie’s body.

He doesn’t know what he’s doing with his hands. There’s a fist of fabric in one, his fingers digging hard into something he can’t quite identify, but he’s fumbling for a hold with the other too, reaching for stability to keep himself from dropping away through a world dissipating into impossibility. His eyes are shut, his throat whimpering on a sound that tastes like a plea and sounds a little like a moan, and Byakuran is purring over his mouth and licking against his lips and Irie can’t stand, it’s only that desperate hold on Byakuran’s shirt keeping him in place and only the fingers bracing at the back of his neck keeping him upright.

He has no idea how long it’s been when Byakuran lets him go. His mouth tastes like sugar and his hands are shaking into uselessness; his breathing is coming too fast, weird little hiccuping inhales that have almost the rhythm of sobs, if he sounded more upset and less radiantly, incandescently overheated. Byakuran laughs, a tiny bright sound at Irie’s mouth, finally lets his hold on the other’s arm go so he can slide his hand in against Irie’s jawline instead. Irie doesn’t even try to resist this time; he tips sideways immediately, as instant to respond as if he’s melting to Byakuran’s touch, still gasping for air that he can’t fit into the panicked tremor of his lungs.

“It’ll be a few weeks,” Byakuran is saying, as calmly as if there’s been no interruption to their conversation, as if Irie isn’t shaking so badly the motion is audible in his breathing. “I’ll call you while I’m gone.”

The world is still spinning too fast for Irie to muster any attempt at coherency, much less a response to encompass everything he wants to say. It doesn’t seem to matter. Byakuran is still watching him, still smiling, still pressing his fingers in against his skin, until when he says “You’re cute when you’re flustered, Sho-chan,” and leans in for another kiss Irie can’t think to do anything but shut his eyes and tip his head up in surrender.


	16. Honest

Irie isn’t asleep when his phone rings.

He  _should_  be. Midnight came and went hours ago; anyone reasonable would have been asleep long since. But  _should_  and  _are_  are almost never aligned in Irie’s experience, and so he’s not surprised when his clock clicks over to single digits while he’s still staring wide-eyed at the night-dim illumination of the ceiling.

He’s settling into the experience of it, the special kind of exhausted boredom that comes with the desire for sleep and the absence of sufficient calm to achieve it, when there’s a flash of light from beside the bed, his phone lighting itself up a moment before it actually begins to ring. The bright makes him flinch, the sound piercing through the dreamy haze of not-quite-sleep, and by the time he’s turned over to reach for the phone his heart is pounding with as much adrenaline as if he were truly woken from sleep instead of just startled.

“Hello?” he asks as he gets the speaker to his ear, squinting myopically at the clock by the bed to try to make out the time. It’s late -- he knew that already -- but the suggestion of a leading three stutters fear into his chest, the reasons for a call at this hour numerous and none of them good.

Then “Sho-chan” purring silky-sweet, and Irie’s panic dissolves to reform itself into a wholly different kind of tension.

“Oh,” he says, breathless and almost gasping the sound. His skin flickers hot, alertness flooding him in spite of the hour and the weight of his insomnia, his heart fluttering against his ribcage. “Byakuran.”

“You were awake,” Byakuran says, the dip of judgment in his voice clear even over the phone, dark enough to spike Irie’s blood into a shiver. “You should have been asleep by now, Sho-chan.”

“I was trying,” Irie says, anxious with defense. “I’m in bed right now, I just couldn’t get to sleep.” Then his exhausted thoughts catch up with the rest of the situation, crease a line of frustration into his forehead. “You would have woken me up if I  _was_  asleep.”

“I wanted to surprise you.” Byakuran sounds like he’s pouting, childish petulance staining the edge of his voice. “It’s no fun if you’re completely awake.”

Irie drops back to the bed, shuts his eyes and heaves a sigh to the dark of the room. “What do you  _want_ , Byakuran?”

“I wanted to talk to you,” Byakuran says immediately, as quickly as if he was just waiting for Irie to ask. “Italy is beautiful, I have so much to tell you about.”

Irie frowns. “Right  _now_? It’s the middle of the night.”

“You weren’t sleeping anyway,” Byakuran says, Irie’s argument stalled out by his own words. “Wouldn’t you rather listen to me than lie in bed trying to sleep?”

Irie doesn’t have an answer to that. The  _no_  that feels reasonable sticks on his tongue like a lie, the  _yes_  of sincerity too much of an admission to make it past his throat, and then Byakuran laughs into the taut silence, a frisson of sound that prickles electricity down Irie’s spine.

“How are you doing?” he asks, the words sticky with insincerity, the polite phrasing as much a trap as sugar on poison.

Irie sighs, lifts a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose. “I’m fine.”

“Awake at 3am isn’t fine, Sho-chan,” Byakuran says, the momentum of the conversation inexorable. His voice is going softer, sliding into a range that tingles heat into Irie’s blood and nervous strain into his body. “Do you miss me?”

“No,” Irie forces past his stubborn throat, fast, before he can breathe in and imagine the scent of lavender clinging to the air.

“Really.” Byakuran sounds amused, sounds unconvinced. “Not even a little?”

Irie shakes his head against the mattress, even though Byakuran can’t see it. It’s the best he can manage with his skin prickling hot, with his throat going tense on unvoiced confessions.

“That’s too bad.” Byakuran sighs, the sound heavy and melodramatic even over the static of the phone. “I thought kissing you was a surefire way to have you pining for me.”

Irie’s self-control gives out, then. The dark of the room isn’t enough distraction to overcome the force of memory as his vision suddenly goes bright with the memory of pale hair and a too-soft smile. His mouth comes open, his breath rushing out of lungs gone useless, and the sound he makes is far too close to a whine before he can clap a hand over his mouth to stifle the involuntary noise.

“What was that?” Byakuran chirps, bright and relentless. “I didn’t hear you.” Then, without waiting for the answer Irie can’t form: “I’m going to kiss you again when I get back,” low and weighted like a promise. “You were so  _responsive_ ,” and that one word flares heat into every inch of Irie’s skin, embarrassment at what details he can remember and the ache of absence at once, desire so bone-deep he can’t ever hope to hold it back.

“Though maybe not,” Byakuran goes on, slow and considering, and Irie goes cold, horror rushing out into him hard on the heels of all that warmth. “Since you don’t mind that I’m gone.”

“I do,” Irie blurts, the ache in his throat taking on a life of its own to force sound against the clasp of his fingers. He feels awareness of what he’s done prickle against the back of his neck, hears a whimper of resignation slide over his tongue, but it’s too late, Byakuran is humming curiosity against the phone.

“I didn’t hear,” he lies, drawling the words into teasing. “Tell me again, Sho-chan.”

Irie shuts his eyes, lifts his hand away from his mouth to drop his arm over his eyes instead. It seems easier, somehow. “I  _do_.”

“Tell me,” Byakuran orders, and Irie obeys, exhausted submission to the drag of loneliness melting hot and aching in his veins.

“I do miss you.” A breath, a moment to form the words in his head, and then: “I miss you all the time, at work, at home, when I’m trying to sleep. I want you to come back, I want to see you, I want--”

 _To kiss you_ , Irie’s thoughts finish, and his body balks at the sound, his mouth closing on the words to turn them into a whine. His chest hurts, the ache of want and desperate gratitude for even the staticky sound of Byakuran’s voice tangling into a knot of tears, the thud of his too-fast heartbeat pounding against his head like an oncoming migraine.

“Tell me.” Byakuran’s voice is dark, now, carrying shadows like those filling the room, syrupy-slow and just as weighted. “Sho-chan. Tell me.”

“I want you to kiss me,” Irie says, so fast the words tangle on his tongue and come out incoherent. “I wanted you to kiss me for weeks before you did and since you did it’s all I can think about. Why did you  _leave_?”

“You sound desperate,” Byakuran purrs, and that’s not an answer but Irie doesn’t have the nerve to call him out on it. “I miss you too, Sho-chan.”

Irie can’t tell if that’s sincere or not, if the sound of a smile in Byakuran’s voice is from affection or amusement at his expense. He’s sure in the morning that will matter more, will give him an endless array of reasons to panic. Right now it doesn’t matter.

“Thank you for calling,” Irie says, his voice breaking on sincerity. “I miss you so much.”

Byakuran’s laugh sounds like a lullaby.


	17. Possessive

Byakuran doesn’t stop calling.

The interruption is never at the same time, Irie determines very rapidly. The second time he gets a call he’s at work and has to rush through an apology before Byakuran lets him go with an admonishment to expect a conversation later; the follow-up doesn’t come until eleven that night, after Irie has worked himself nearly frantic with panic that it won’t come at all, and then Byakuran sounds completely calm, his voice completely absent the irritation audible in his tone during the earlier call. He calls during dinner, in the middle of the night more than once, on one occasion first thing in the morning when Irie is walking to the train station to go to work. Invariably the conversations are friendly, consisting primarily of Byakuran talking to Irie rather than any kind of actual dialogue, and leave Irie so shaky and weak-kneed that he has to sit down to collect himself if he’s not already lying down. By the end of the first week Irie is in a constant state of expectation, his nerves frayed down to hair-trigger response, until when he’s woken from fretful sleep eleven days after Byakuran’s departure by his phone ringing he’s more grateful than otherwise to be pulled from the threat of nightmares.

“Byakuran,” he says against the pillow, not bothering to find his glasses so he can confirm who’s calling. There’s only one person it ever is, anymore.

The purr on the other end of the line -- a hum of satisfaction, so hot Irie can feel it run along his spine like a touch -- is enough to confirm his certainty before Byakuran says, “I woke you up” with as much pleasure dripping off the words as if this some kind of victory, as if Irie is even fighting anymore.

“Yes,” Irie admits, too worn out from weeks of near-constant strain to attempt to dissemble. He turns his head sideways, sighs against the dark of the room. “You did.”

“Were you dreaming about me, Sho-chan?” Byakuran asks, his voice dipping into the thrum of seduction that Irie can never quite categorize as either teasing or sincere. He wasn’t -- his dreams were too vague for that, a sense of responsibilities left undone, a need to run with feet too heavy to move, an unfathomable loss approaching unseen -- but the idea prickles against his scalp, across the lines of ink running up his arms, at the part of his lips, and when he says “No” it comes out weighted with disappointment he doesn’t intend. “I was having a nightmare.”

“Poor Sho-chan,” Byakuran hums, his sympathy turning false on the sticky-sweet drawl of the words. “You just don’t sleep well without me, do you?”

Irie whimpers in lieu of a more coherent response. He doesn’t even know what he’d say; protest seems shallow, given the half-day he spent deep in dreamless sleep on Byakuran’s couch, but he can’t bring himself to agree, even if all evidence indicates the statement to be true. It doesn’t seem to matter much; Byakuran just laughs anyway, a warm purr of sound over the static of distance.

“Don’t worry,” he says in a tone precisely calculated to send a shudder of worry down Irie’s spine. “It’s just one more night.”

Irie blushes, first. The self-consciousness at the implication in Byakuran’s words is irresistible, burning color over his cheeks brightly enough that he has to turn his head down to the pillow as if Byakuran can somehow see his expression through the phone. His imagination goes hot, suggests the shape of another person beside him, the sound of music hanging in the air, and for a moment he’s too deep in the web of his imagination to put together the rest of the implication.

Then he does, and he’s jolting upright, pushing up on his elbow and opening his eyes to stare blank and unseeing at the pillow in front of him. “ _What_?”

“It’s only for tonight,” Byakuran repeats, as if that will somehow clarify his meaning. “And tomorrow during the day, I suppose.”

“What?” Irie says again, his voice losing its strength under the weight of hope too much to even consider for a moment. “Are you--”

“I’m coming back tomorrow,” Byakuran cuts him off, and Irie can feel adrenaline flood into him, the rush washing his vision daytime-bright with anticipation even before Byakuran continues. “My flight is going to land at eleven in the evening.”

“Oh,” Irie says, stunned into a whisper as happiness swells too tight against his chest to let him breathe. “ _Oh_.”

“It’s going to be a long day,” Byakuran muses, humming the words like they have some greater meaning that Irie can’t reach for past the ringing shock in his head. “I’m looking forward to seeing you, Sho-chan.”

“Me?” Irie repeats, incoherent under the weight of his own reaction. “You want to see me tomorrow?”

“I had better,” Byakuran says, and Irie’s shoulders hunch to defend against the sudden shadows in the other’s voice. “You’re meeting me at the airport, after all.”

“What?” Irie feels lost, adrift on the surges of adrenaline that are sending his stomach dropping into freefall and tangling his breathing into a knot in his chest. “I am?”

“You are,” Byakuran says, no question anywhere in his tone. “It wouldn’t be any kind of a homecoming without my Sho-chan there waiting for me.”

Irie wants to protest, maybe, wants to offer at least token resistance, a claim to plans for tomorrow night or the difficulty of getting himself to the airport without the car he certainly doesn’t own and couldn’t drive even if he did. But he doesn’t have plans, knows he would cancel even if he did, and he’s going hot all over again at how casual that possessive sounds on Byakuran’s tongue.

“Okay,” he says, the agreement muffled into a whisper by the tension in his throat, the ache that might be tears and might be a laugh and is certainly oncoming hysteria. “I’ll be there.”

“I knew you would be,” Byakuran purrs, condescension dripping off the words. “I can’t wait to see you again, Sho-chan.”

Irie knows the feeling.


	18. Sweet

The wait feels longer than it is. Between the hour and a half train-and-bus ride out to the airport and Irie’s intense fear of missing the connection between the two he shows up an hour early, so taut with adrenaline every second feels like a hundred and every heartbeat resounds with painful intensity in his chest. It’s not until he arrives that he realizes he can’t make it past security, that he will have to linger in the lobby until Byakuran’s flight lands, and further that in the sleep-deprived panic of the whole event he has failed to bring anything to occupy himself while he waits. In the end Irie stares at his phone for an hour, scrolling idly through his contacts and rereading every text message in his inbox, occasionally drifting into something like a doze before jerking awake in a panic that more than a few minutes have passed and that he has somehow missed Byakuran’s arrival. By the time the flight is heralded by the first trickle of passengers into the front lobby, Irie has gone right through the tension of nerves into the vague nausea that comes after, the adrenaline-hangover that spikes pain against his temples and twists into an unbearable weight in the pit of his stomach.

He keeps watching the arrivals, the trickle turning to a flow turning to a surge, parents and children and families and friends, the few others waiting in the space matching with their loved ones and exiting into the shadows of the night outside. Irie keeps getting distracted, the exhaustion in his veins from too many nights of not enough sleep conspiring to draw his gaze to linger on an elderly couple collecting a visiting grandchild, on a young girl edgy with anticipation who shrieks at the arrival of an exhausted-looking boy and runs to fling herself into his arms. There’s a pair of young men that come out of the hallway together, their too-close steps not enough to hide the way their fingers are intertwined or the way one keeps glancing at the other with a smile so soft Irie looks away as his cheeks burn crimson. There’s dozens of reunions to watch, a steady stream of passers-by to hold his attention, but none the one that interests him, no one even close enough in appearance to give him a moment of heart-stopping hope. The lobby fills itself with sound and happiness, laughter and voices chattering into white-noise incoherence; then it empties again, the flood slowing again to a trickle, even that diminishing until there are only a few latecomers passing through the lobby, shooting glances at Irie as if wondering who he could still be waiting for before continuing on and out the main doors.

And then the doors open, and Byakuran steps through, and Irie’s heart stutters itself into his throat.

He had worried, before, that maybe Byakuran wouldn’t see him, that the crowd would hide his slumped shoulders and that he’d have to step forward or call out to get the other’s attention. But the room is empty by the time Byakuran emerges, even the cluster around the luggage pickup dissipated into the night, and Byakuran’s gaze cuts straight to Irie as he steps through the doors as if the other had shouted his name. He smiles -- a bright, blinding thing, sharper and more striking than Irie remembered -- and then he’s coming forward, cutting a straight line across the floor with complete disregard for the chairs and low tables in his way.

“Sho-chan!” It’s loud, so bright it echoes off the walls around them, and Irie gets to his feet, shoving a shaking hand through his hair as Byakuran steps onto a chair and across the gap to a tabletop before stepping back on the ground as lightly as if he had wings. He’s close, the lines of Irie’s tattoo on his cheek coming into sharp focus as he approaches, and then he’s  _there_ , suddenly, too close and too beautiful and with a hand closing against the back of Irie’s neck to pull him in closer. Irie leans forward, whimpering some kind of instinctive not-quite-protest as his balance sways dangerously under him, and then Byakuran’s mouth is on his and all he can do is grab for a handhold against the other’s shirt as his gravity drops away along with the air in his lungs. His mouth comes open, trying to gasp for oxygen or for Byakuran, he doesn’t know which, and then Byakuran is licking into his mouth and Irie’s head is spinning too much to think about anything except the taste of artificial sugar on his tongue, the silky-soft of fabric against his palms, the faint smell of sunflowers in his nose. There’s a suggestion of dehydration, too, the sterile unpleasantness of recycled air, but it dissipates as Byakuran hums against Irie’s mouth, slides a hand up under the edge of his t-shirt to brace skin-to-skin heat against his lower back and pull him in closer.

Irie’s dizzy when Byakuran lets him go. He has an arm around the other’s shoulders, he realizes, a fist of the other’s shirt dragging the fabric off-center, and another against the hem in the front, his fingers pulling down in some unspoken plea for something he can’t frame. His heart is pounding so hard he can hear the blood roaring in his ears, his breathing so fast Byakuran must be able to feel every inhale, and he can’t pull away, he can’t remember how to work his mouth into anything other than the inherent offer of damp-parted lips.

“Sho-chan,” Byakuran says again. Irie watches his eyes flicker, watches his gaze drag over the lines of Irie’s face to match the fingers stroking against the back of his neck and trailing suggestion up his spine, and if he had the breath to spare he would whimper at the consideration. As it is all he can do is shiver, instinctive adrenaline coursing through his veins in place of anything more coherent. Byakuran’s eyes come up to his, draw dark and amused on a smile, and then he touches his tongue to his lips, licks at the very corner of his mouth like he’s tasting the lingering flavor of some favorite food.

“You  _did_  miss me,” he says, purring satisfaction, and leans in closer, fits his damp lips to the edge of Irie’s jaw, just over the thrumming pulse under his skin. Irie’s throat goes tight, pulls his exhale into a whine, and he is suddenly desperately, helplessly relieved that Byakuran waited so long to come out, if only to spare him an audience.

“Come on,” Byakuran says, the words humming into vibration against Irie’s throat until Irie can taste the echo on his own tongue. “Let’s go home.”

Irie doesn’t ask where that is, doesn’t ask whose home it is they are going to, doesn’t ask about Byakuran’s inexplicable lack of luggage or bags or anything but himself. He just shuts his eyes, tips his head in submission to the press of Byakuran’s lips, and when Byakuran steps back to replace his hold on Irie’s neck with the press of fingers looping around his wrist, Irie lets himself be led to the door and into one of the waiting taxis without protest.

The sugar lingering on his tongue is enough.


	19. Obedience

Byakuran keeps his hold on Irie’s wrist for the entire duration of the ride to his apartment. Irie was expecting to be freed once they were in the backseat together, if only so Byakuran could fit an arm along the back of the seat and around his shoulders, but apparently that particular variety of teasing has dissipated with the confirmation of a kiss. Byakuran appears wholly content to lounge against the seat alongside Irie and complain in a voice like syrup about the woes of international travel, and if Irie isn’t ready to say he misses the contact, he is more than grateful for the way Byakuran leans sideways towards him, the way the turns in the road bring Byakuran’s arm flush against his, the way Byakuran’s thumb glides up against the flutter of adrenaline in his wrist. It’s enough to warm all his blood hazy with pleasure, the faint scent of lavender in the air enough to take the edge off his nerves, until he doesn’t remember to panic about where they’re going -- or more accurately, what they’re going to  _do_  there -- until Byakuran is leading him past the front gate and into the elevator, brightly-lit in defiance of the lateness of the hour.

“You didn’t bring anything with you, Sho-chan,” Byakuran observes as the mechanism glides up over the intervening floors from the ground to his apartment, the motion so smooth Irie can’t blame the machine for the way his stomach seems to linger at the entrance.

Irie looks sideways at the sound of his name, as helplessly responsive as if the reaction is hardwired into his blood. Byakuran is watching him, a smile curling at the corner of his mouth and his fingers still tight on the limp submission in Irie’s wrist.

“Um,” Irie says, trying to look away and not quite remembering how to do so. “No.” He reaches up to fumble needlessly with his glasses. “S-should I have?”

Byakuran hums noncommittally, lifts a shoulder in an easy shrug to match the lopsided pull of his smile. “It’s fine,” he says in a way that tenses worry against Irie’s temples. “I can work around it.”

“Work around it?” Irie repeats. “How...what are you--”

The elevator doors opens.

“Ah!” Byakuran chirps, cutting Irie off mid-question and stepping forward into the room. His hold on the other’s wrist remains, even if his attention appears to be on the clean lines of the room in front of him; Irie is dragged forward by that grip, stumbling as he moves until he almost falls over the step down to the living area.

“Home sweet home,” Byakuran is purring, the words low and satisfied in his throat before he turns back to Irie and draws the other closer by his wrist. “Isn’t it good to be back?”

“I don’t--” Irie starts, and Byakuran reaches up for his neck, the electric touch of his fingers against Irie’s collar enough to overwrite anything he might have said. Irie’s mouth is still open, lips parted on the sudden loss of his words, and Byakuran leans in to kiss him again, fits his lips against Irie’s with a careful precision that blurs all Irie’s thoughts out of any semblance of order. Irie doesn’t mean to whimper, doesn’t mean to reach for Byakuran’s shoulder, but his throat is humming without any intention on his part and there’s the soft give of fabric under his fingers, the support of Byakuran’s shoulder steadying the tremble in his knees.

Byakuran lingers for a moment, lets Irie’s fingers settle against his shoulder as he traces against the line of the other’s mouth; then he steps back, releases his hold on Irie’s wrist and moves away in a movement so fluid Irie doesn’t even feel the rejection of the action for a breath. By the time he’s blinked himself back into focus and has found the focus to say “Byakuran?” in a tone made plaintive on the tremble in his throat, the other is halfway to the hallway and barely glances back to flash an unreadable smile.

“Take your shoes off and wait for me on the couch,” he announces, waving a hand through the air like he’s brushing Irie’s question away. Irie is left staring after him, his skin prickling with electricity gone cold in the other’s absence; it’s not until Byakuran has rounded the corner and disappeared from sight that Irie can collect himself enough to move towards the couch as indicated.

There’s less to look at, this time. Byakuran drew the blinds before he left the city, left the weight of the fabric to obscure Irie’s view of the city below, and the vacation-tidiness of the apartment gives Irie very little to distract himself with as he settles onto the couch and tries to remember how to relax against the support. The cushions are soft, the pillows inviting, but then he sees the texture on one of them and remembers falling asleep the last time, remembers sleeping in Byakuran’s home for  _hours_ , and then he’s flushing such a dark crimson that his already faint hope of relaxation scatters.

“What’s wrong?” Byakuran asks from just over his shoulder, and Irie startles so badly he nearly kicks the table in front of him. He twists in the first surge of adrenaline, pivots to look over his shoulder, and Byakuran is leaning over the couch, far closer than Irie was expecting him to be. He’s smiling still, the soft of his mouth all at odds with the shadows in his eyes, and when he fits his fingers to the back of Irie’s neck it’s to brace the other in place as much as to offer the heat of friction.

“Don’t be so afraid,” he purrs, leaning in so close Irie can taste the words on his lips. Irie can feel his spine arching with tension, his hands clenching into anxious fists at his sides; he doesn’t know what to do with his legs, can feel uncertainty locking all his joints as awkward as if he’s become a doll. “I’ll take care of you.”

“Hh,” Irie whimpers, coherent response completely failing him, and then Byakuran is laughing, the heat of amusement pouring over Irie’s tongue before his mouth comes down on Irie’s again. He still tastes like sugar, the impression so strong Irie wonders vaguely if he wasn’t eating candy in the few seconds he was gone, and then he’s moving, fluid grace bringing him over the edge of the couch so that very suddenly there is nothing between Byakuran’s body and Irie’s except for the too-thin barrier of their clothing.

“Calm down,” Byakuran says in that tone that makes obedience to the order an impossibility. His fingers are still against the back of Irie’s neck, feathering up into the other’s hair; Irie can feel the scrape of fingernails against his scalp, the friction shivering down his spine like it’s sliding directly into his bloodstream. Byakuran leans in closer, humming something that is perhaps intended as soothing and just feels like fire, and then he’s pressing a knee between Irie’s, tipping in so close Irie leans back reflexively. It’s too far, his balance gives out to deposit him over the couch, but Byakuran doesn’t pull away; he’s smiling again, laughing over Irie’s mouth, and when he licks against the other’s lips all Irie can think about is sugar.

“You’re shaking,” Byakuran observes, fitting the words against the part of Irie’s trembling lips. Irie can’t reach out, can’t arch up for more, isn’t even sure he would dare to if he had the coordination to make the attempt; he can’t tell what’s allowed, yet, and Byakuran’s fingers pressing against the back of his neck are more than enough to keep his attention out-of-focus. “What are you so scared of?”

Irie doesn’t answer. He can’t breathe, can barely stand to look at Byakuran as close-up as he is now. He exhales instead, the tension in his throat turning the sound into a desperate whimper, and Byakuran laughs again, presses in closer to rest his lips against Irie’s jaw, to slide up closer to his ear as his hair catches against Irie’s mouth.

“Breathe, Sho-chan.” There’s a sound from the side of the couch -- something hitting the floor, Irie thinks -- and then a hand, fingers spreading wide against the soft of Irie’s t-shirt to press the fabric flush to his skin, and Irie is arching up, sucking a shocked inhale like he’s never been touched before in all his life. Byakuran’s laugh is too loud, proximity making the huff something overwhelming and close, and his fingers slide down, tracing out the line of Irie’s waist to his hip while Irie’s throat closes up on the possibility of air.

“ _Byakuran_ ,” he manages, finally, as fingertips hit the edge of his shirt, slide the cloth up to spark bare-skin electricity out into his body.

“I told you to breathe,” Byakuran says, his voice shimmering itself into darkness and his touch going sideways, flaring into impossible heat as it goes.

“ _Oh_ ,” Irie offers, his hips coming up off the couch like Byakuran’s touch is urging them to movement. They’re too close, Byakuran’s too near and his hand is too low and-- “What -- what are you--”

“Sho-chan.” Low, that, faintly chastising. “You’re smarter than that.” The touch against Irie’s stomach shifts, Byakuran’s thumb fitting along the edge of the button on his jeans, and Irie’s throat gives a drawn-out whine, something too hot to bear shuddering low and resonant in his chest.

“But.” Irie’s head is spinning, Byakuran’s tugging his zipper down; he’s so overheated he only has a brief stutter of embarrassment at how hard he is, at how patently obvious that must be from Byakuran’s angle over him. “The bed?”

“Mm.” It’s not a no -- Irie recognizes the amused tolerance in that tone -- and then Byakuran’s fingers are sliding over him, dragging friction over flushed-hot skin through his boxers, and the sound Irie makes nearly drowns out the other’s response. “We’ll get there.”

“What?” Irie blinks hard, tries to find the logic in a world where Byakuran is pinning him back to the couch, where Byakuran’s fingers are pressing the thin of his boxers against the heat of his cock, where he’s clutching so hard against Byakuran’s shoulder his fingers must be leaving bruises.

“You’re too tense,” Byakuran says, and his hand is sliding away, and Irie whimpers in relief or distress, he’s not sure which. Byakuran is pulling away, leaning back to sit up, and Irie just has time to process the way he must look -- spread out across Byakuran’s couch with his pants undone and his hair tangled and his legs trembling -- before there are fingers hooking into his clothes to strip his jeans off and darken his cheeks crimson with self-consciousness.

“ _Ah_ ,” he blurts, and “ _Byakuran_ ” as he starts to sit up, but Byakuran is dragging his clothes off without the least hint of hesitation, and Irie’s reach to stop him stalls just shy of contact. His jeans come free, his uncovered skin going chill in the cool of the room, and then Byakuran is dropping the clothing to the floor and reaching out to push him back down as easily as if Irie’s resistance doesn’t exist at all.

“Relax,” he says again, shifting his knees so he’s fitting between the open angle of Irie’s, the position suggestive even were Irie still fully clothed, even if Byakuran weren’t smiling at him with sugar and shadows at his lips. “I told you, I’m going to take care of you.”

“What?” Irie asks again, incoherence tangling itself into that one note of confusion, and then Byakuran’s fingers close around his cock and he’s arching again, his head tilting back and throat opening up on a groan in spite of any effort he might make to the contrary. Byakuran’s fingers are hot, warm even against the heat of Irie’s skin, and then he moves and the friction starbursts into Irie’s head, aches the strain of  _almost_ all along his spine, and he’s very sure, very suddenly, that he’s thirty seconds out from coming all over his shirt and Byakuran’s too-steady fingers.

“Breathe,” Byakuran hums, shaping the order into a laugh, and then he lets go, his fingers sliding in a way that makes Irie think perhaps thirty seconds was an overestimation. It’s a relief, it’s a disappointment; Irie falls to the couch, gasping for air like he’s been underwater, his skin so hot he can’t even tell if he’s blushing or not for the burn all over his body. Byakuran’s hold at his shoulder lifts, his shadow drawing back again to leave Irie to the overbright light, but Irie doesn’t look to see what Byakuran’s doing. He lets his arm fall over his face instead, presses the back of his hand against his glasses and shuts his eyes like that will give him back control over his own breathing or ease the sparking heat flaring through his veins.

“You’re so cute,” Byakuran says, his voice easy and amused from some place of impossible composure. Irie has a moment to process the cool of the air at his skin, the reminder of his current position, before he flinches, embarrassment surging color into his cheeks.

“Calm down,” Byakuran teases. Irie can hear him moving, the soft sound of his clothes sliding against each other.

“I  _can’t_ ,” he manages, the word skipping into petulance past his lips. “I  _can’t_  calm down with you.” It seems safer to say it to the shadow of his arm, when he can’t see Byakuran’s reaction. “You don’t  _let_  me.”

“I don’t  _let_  you,” Byakuran repeats, his voice going so low and thrumming with weight that it prickles up Irie’s spine, chills his blood with foreboding. “Is that so?”

“That’s not what I mean,” Irie backtracks, dropping his arm to see the absence of Byakuran’s smile, the dark consideration in his eyes. “You make me so nervous, I can’t--”

“You  _can_ ,” Byakuran says. There’s a hand at Irie’s knee, fingers fitting in against his leg with an uncanny gentleness. “ _Relax_.”

“I  _can’t_ ,” Irie wails, and then there’s a touch, fingers tracing up the inside of his thigh, the slick feel of the contact enough to give away their intent. He shudders, adrenaline demanding fear and anticipation at once, and then Byakuran’s touch is sliding against his entrance and his entire body starts to shake.

“You can,” Byakuran soothes, his voice almost a comfort, the sound almost a lullaby. “Breathe, Sho-chan.”

“Please,” Irie says, too-fast and too-hot, “please, Byakuran” and he doesn’t know what he’s begging for, if it’s for the return of the practiced hold sliding over him or for the thrust of lube-slick fingers into him or for just the sweet of Byakuran’s mouth again, the shadow of his shoulders to offer relief from the light. The tension is bleeding out of him with the sound on his lips, the taste of desperation familiar enough to override the panic of anxiety in his veins, and Byakuran is humming some note of satisfaction over him as if he’s won some unstated game. Irie sags against the couch, gasping for air at a rate that sounds like crying, and then Byakuran pushes and slides a finger into him and Irie’s attention fractures and falls to pieces. His skin is going hot, rippling in waves through his whole body, the friction of an orgasm without the associated relief, and Byakuran is still humming, urging his touch in farther until Irie is arching off the couch again, until his breathing has turned to sobs in truth, frantic pleas for something he can’t even parse that all come out as “Byakuran” on his lips.

“Ssh,” Byakuran is saying, smooth and warm over him, and he’s closer again, he’s leaning in over the taut arch of Irie’s back and is smoothing his fingers through the other’s hair, pushing tangled curls off Irie’s forehead. “It’s okay, Sho-chan, you’re fine.” His finger slides deeper and Irie groans, his hips coming up off the couch entirely for a moment, the shift of Byakuran’s touch inside him too much and too intimate to process.

“Byakuran,” he gasps, his hand coming up to touch a soft shirt, to tangle into pale hair. Byakuran is laughing again, his lips kiss-close, but Irie can’t think enough to steady his mouth for such, can’t do anything but choke for air from Byakuran’s mouth.

“It’s okay,” Byakuran says, his forehead tipping in to bump against Irie’s. “I’m here, Sho-chan” and he presses somewhere inside Irie and everything fractures into white. Somewhere Irie’s throat is tensing around a moan, somewhere he’s curving entirely off the couch with the shuddering tension of pleasure, somewhere his cock is spilling sticky all across the front of his t-shirt, but where he is there’s just heat, dizzying relief rushing through him and the sound of Byakuran purring satisfied laughter over him.

Irie is lying limp and still over the couch by the time he can see clearly enough to watch Byakuran lean back and away again. The slide of the other’s touch out of him makes him shiver, the loss leaving him achy all over, but then there’s a hand at his shoulder again, fingers tightening into a hold to urge him upright.

“Come on, Sho-chan.” Byakuran’s laughing again, the amusement clearly at Irie’s expense, but Irie can’t find the energy to go tense and stressed about it. He feels exhausted, pleasure settling so bone-deep into him that even when Byakuran tugs at the edge of his shirt to drag it up over his head he doesn’t protest, just ducks his head free of the collar and lets Byakuran drop it to the floor along with the rest of his clothing. An arm comes around his shoulders, draws him closer, and Irie lets his weight tip sideways to rest at Byakuran’s shoulder while the other reaches down to collect what Irie now realizes is the bottle of lube he went to get when they came in. “We’re going to the bedroom.”

“Already?” Irie asks, reaching out to catch at Byakuran’s far shoulder as the other stands to pull them both to their feet. His knees are shaky, his whole body heavy with heat and still trembling with the aftereffects of Byakuran’s fingers pressing against him, but Byakuran doesn’t seem at all fazed by Irie’s unsteady footing, just loops his arm around the other’s waist to guide him out of the living room and towards the hall. “But I just…”

“Sho-chan.” Chastising, that, amusement coupled with condescension; Byakuran turns his head, his lips ghosting against Irie’s forehead as they round the corner. “I  _told_  you we’d make it to the bedroom, didn’t I?” A doorway, a room; the walls are pale, in here, faint purple or maybe white, but it’s the bed that draws Irie’s attention, the spread of the sheets so dark he can’t tell whether they’re black or oversaturated violet. Byakuran leads him to the foot of the bed, pushes at his hip to turn him around; when he presses his palm to Irie’s chest and shoves, Irie falls back onto the mattress without any attempt at resistance.

“I’m not done with you,” Byakuran declares, stripping his shirt off over his head in one graceful motion. His skin is very white, so pale it looks nearly blue in the bedroom-dim lighting. “That was just the warm-up.”

“The warm-up?” Irie repeats.

Byakuran’s mouth curves into a smile, the edges of his teeth catching the light for a moment. “That’s right.” He tosses the bottle to land against the soft of the sheets under Irie, reaches for the front of his pants without looking away from the other’s face. Irie wants to watch Byakuran’s hands, wants to track the elegance of his fingers and the pale line of skin exposed as he slides the dark of his jeans off his hips, but he can’t look away from Byakuran’s eyes, is as caught by the color in them as if they’re a web. “You feel warmer, don’t you?”

Irie hesitates, takes in the radiance of his skin, the flush clinging to his cheeks and hot across his cheekbones; Byakuran is smiling at him, is coming up onto the bed to lean over him, and when he leans down towards Irie’s mouth Irie feels as if he could the the place of the sun in the sky.

“Yes,” he says, and Byakuran kisses him, presses the sound away from his mouth and clarity away from his thoughts. Irie feels like he’s drifting, like all the pieces of himself are coming apart to reform themselves into something better and brighter under Byakuran’s touch. When he reaches up he touches bare skin, his fingers fitting against the bracing tension along Byakuran’s shoulders, and Byakuran hums pleasure, arches in closer until his skin is skimming heat against Irie’s. Irie’s heart is thrumming in his chest, pounding too-fast at his ribs, but his breathing is slow, his inhales huge lungfuls of air that feel enough to lift him off the bed.

“Sho-chan,” Byakuran says, slurring the sound over Irie’s mouth; then he’s pulling away, sliding free of Irie’s hold to sit up into the light. His hair looks purple again, lavender and lilac settling against the strands and outlining his tattoo, and Irie’s gaze follows the color, focuses in against the sharp edge of marked cheekbone while Byakuran reaches for the lube to slick his fingers again. Everything is bright, the air glowing from the inside out like it’s turned to starlight, and Irie is trembling-warm and so relaxed he doesn’t even tense when Byakuran tosses the bottle aside and leans in over him again.

“You’re calmer,” Byakuran observes as he braces an elbow over Irie’s shoulder, as his fingers slide up into tangled hair. Irie shuts his eyes, tips his head in towards the touch, and Byakuran hums at him, presses a gentle thumb against his cheek as he traces up the inside of Irie’s leg. “You’re doing well, Sho-chan.”

Irie’s exhale goes warm in his throat, comes out with the shape of a laugh on his lips. “You make me sound like some kind of pet.”

“Mm,” Byakuran purrs, so low and satisfied it takes Irie a moment to realize that it’s not a negation. He hasn’t yet decided if he minds when Byakuran’s fingers slide over him, pressure enough to shiver awareness down his spine, and then Byakuran’s saying, “I think you can try two, don’t you?” He doesn’t wait for Irie’s answer; there’s a push instead, fingers offering pressure eased by a lack of friction, and Irie shudders an exhale as he feels himself stretch to allow Byakuran’s movement into him. The pressure slides up his spine, tension trying to impose itself on the weight of exhaustion keeping him slack against the sheets, but there’s no pain, even if every inhale feels like it might bring an ache.

“Good,” Byakuran praises, leaning in to punctuate with lips grazing the corner of Irie’s mouth, his fingers twisting into a hold in Irie’s hair. “That’s my Sho-chan, just relax.”

Irie lets out a breath, reaches for Byakuran’s shoulder to steady himself. The pressure is still lying flush against his spine, telling him this is too much, telling him this stretch is not-quite comfortable, but Byakuran is humming pleasure at him, still easing his fingers in deeper with every shift of his hand. He draws back by an inch, gives Irie a moment to take a breath; then he’s moving again, thrusting back in and deeper than before, making space for himself inside Irie’s body.

“Let’s see,” Byakuran says, sounding thoughtful and calm and out of all alignment with what he’s doing. “Where was it, exactly?”

Irie blinks his eyes open, tips his head to stare confusion at Byakuran. “Where was wh--” he starts, and then Byakuran curls his fingers to push against him, and Irie shudders into blinding sensation for a moment. It’s heat, Irie thinks, pressure that pools fire low in his stomach and jolts tension along his spine to white out his thoughts, but mostly it’s overwhelming, the friction dropping his knees wide and tilting his head back on a gasp as it threatens his cock with heat again.

“There,” Byakuran purrs, satisfied and dangerous, draws his hand back to do it again. Irie groans this time, some useless attempt to ride out the heat that swamps him, and he’s going hard in spite of the languid exhaustion in his body, helpless to resist the impulse of Byakuran’s fingers working inside him. Byakuran draws back, spreads his fingers wider, and the pressure feels like the shape of a promise now, the suggestion of more written in the way Byakuran pushes in deeper to force Irie into another shudder against the bed.

“This is why we started on the couch,” Byakuran offers conversationally, as he sets a rhythm with his hand that arches Irie up into an involuntary curve of sensation with each stroke. He sounds unreasonably calm, Irie notes distantly; if it weren’t for the heat of arousal he can feel pressing against his thigh when he lets his knee tip in, Irie would think Byakuran wholly unaffected. “You would have lost it too quickly otherwise.”

Irie’s cheeks go hot, his embarrassment apparently not yet absent even under the circumstances. “ _Byakuran_ ,” he starts, his throat turning the sound to a wail, and Byakuran thrusts his fingers in again to cut off his coherency as cleanly as if with a knife.

“And because you looked good coming all over yourself,” he goes on, his fingers pressing in tighter against Irie’s hair and his mouth wandering down to the other’s throat instead. There’s a kiss at Irie’s neck, a tongue dragging over his collarbone, and then Byakuran is rocking back and away, taking his balance over his heels while Irie gasps for air. His fingers trail across Irie’s shoulder, chest, down over the trembling motion of his stomach; there’s the suggestion of fingers against his cock, a thumb pressing against the swollen head, but Byakuran pulls away before Irie can even groan, pushes against his thigh instead to urge his legs wider.

“You look better like this, though,” he declares, as if he’s just come to the decision. His fingers slide free, their absence leaving Irie slick and shaking for more, and when he closes his hand around himself Irie finally looks down, watches Byakuran’s fingers slide with easy grace over the flushed shape of his cock even as Irie’s cheeks go hot and his breathing catches in his chest.

“Mm,” Byakuran purrs, the sound sing-songy and pleased, and then he’s leaning back in, pressing Irie’s legs wide with the movement of his hips, and Irie can’t remember how to inhale, can’t think to breathe. Everything is stalling in his chest, his blood going too-hot with anticipation, and Byakuran is leaning in closer, so near Irie can see the flutter of his eyelashes when he looks down at Irie’s parted lips, can see the private catch of his smile at whatever he sees on the other’s face.

“Sho-chan.” Low, warm, and Byakuran’s right there against him, the slick heat of his cock is pushing against Irie’s entrance. “ _Breathe_.”

Irie breathes. The air lets out of his lungs in a rush, in a shuddering gust of relief, and Byakuran thrusts forward into him, replaces the pressure of his fingers with the greater stretch of his cock. Irie’s thoughts are dizzy, skidding on ideas of intimacy, of ownership, of submission, but in the end it’s all the same heat anyway, it’s all him reaching for Byakuran’s shoulders and arching up closer with an inhale that sounds like a sob and a wail and relief all at the same time. Byakuran hums against his mouth, curves his back to push in deeper, and Irie hadn’t intended to shut his eyes but everything is dark and sweet and endless, he’s lost in an infinity of friction and warmth and skin slick on his.

“Sho-chan,” Byakuran’s voice says, somewhere in the darkness behind Irie’s closed eyes, the sound more audible appreciation than a comment. His fingers are trailing against Irie’s hip, wandering across his stomach to curl around his cock again, and even that only draws the outline of a whine from Irie’s throat. It’s too much to pull apart the separate pieces; Byakuran’s teeth are catching his lower lip, tugging gentle force against the sensitive skin, Byakuran’s thumb is sliding up over his cock to catch the slick of precome he drew with the motion of his fingers, Byakuran is moving inside him with a heat Irie can feel surging through all the circuitry of his veins. The pressure is overwhelming, crushing and unbearable until all Irie’s resistance gives way to it, until he’s collapsing between Byakuran and the bed and giving himself up for the deliberate glide of Byakuran’s fingers and the even stroke of Byakuran’s hips. There might be a catch of breathing over him, there might be the texture of scars on the shoulders under his hold, but Irie isn’t thinking about that, isn’t even thinking about the way all his breathing sounds like Byakuran’s name, the way every inhale tastes like perfume and sugar on his tongue. He’s too busy shuddering through the electricity, a wire given purpose by a charge, until when Byakuran sighs against his mouth and says “Again” like an order the only thing Irie can do is let the heat burn him out as he trembles through another orgasm at Byakuran’s fingers.

Irie doesn’t know how much longer Byakuran continues. It’s enough that he’s laughing when Irie can hear again, enough that he’s smiling when Irie opens his eyes, enough that he murmurs “Good” as he lets his hold go, the condescension in his tone not enough to steal Irie’s glow of pleasure at the praise. The heat knocks Irie hazy, the second wave of satisfaction drawing him to a level of languid exhaustion he didn’t even know was possible, until he’s almost surprised when Byakuran curves over him as the rhythm of his movements stalls out-of-pace. His shoulders tighten -- and there  _are_  scars there, Irie can feel them shift under his fingers as Byakuran braces himself -- and then Byakuran’s sighing, the concentration in his expression fading into blissful satisfaction, the tension at the corners of his eyes and the constant threat of his smile giving way to slack pleasure for a brief, breathtaking moment as he comes.

“ _Ah_ ,” he offers, his voice going low and weirdly resonant in his throat; then he sighs again, shrugs the tension out of his scarred shoulders in one smooth ripple, and by the time he opens his eyes again the smile is back behind the dark of their color.

“Sho-chan,” he purrs, turning the words inside out with warmth. His fingers in Irie’s hair are sticky, catch against the tangled curls, but Irie doesn’t protest, doesn’t even think to shy away. Byakuran watches the movement of his fingers for a moment; Irie can feel them working through his hair, drawing friction across his scalp and aftershock heat along his spine. Then Byakuran blinks, brings his gaze back to Irie’s face, and there’s a flicker of a smile before he ducks in to slide his mouth into alignment against Irie’s.

Irie shuts his eyes and lets Byakuran kiss him into calm.


	20. Sense

Irie wakes to the smell of perfume.

It’s sweet, trailing through the air like a whisper, easing him up out of sun-washed dreams into a haze of half-consciousness; for a moment he doesn’t realize it’s part of reality, hasn’t yet formed a distinction between sleep and waking, and when he takes a deep breath the immediacy of the sensation is startling.

“You’re awake,” a voice purrs over him, pleasure under the sound, as fingers wind into Irie’s hair. “Morning, Sho-chan.”

“Mm,” Irie offers, still too close to sleep to manage coherency. His glasses are gone; when he lifts a hand to his face his fingers touch the bridge of his nose instead of plastic, and the soft of the pillow under him is uninterrupted by the weight of frames. That gets him to open his eyes, to blink hazily at the unfamiliar dark of the sheets around him. “Where...?”

“You don’t need them right now,” Byakuran says. His fingers are sliding into Irie’s hair again, a strange glancing motion that leaves friction catching against Irie’s scalp even after his touch is gone. “I took them off you after you passed out last night.”

“Oh,” Irie says. The reminder is enough to draw his attention to the strain in his back, the ache in his legs speaking to too much tension sustained for too long. He thinks about blushing, contemplates the possibility of embarrassment, but Byakuran’s fingers are drawing against the back of his neck to fit comfort there and he can’t find the strength for panic. “Okay.”

This appears to be the right answer, from the way Byakuran presses his fingers in harder against the knots in the back of Irie’s neck and hums satisfaction over him; Irie shuts his eyes to the force, lets the heavy weight of comfort sweep out into him. There’s another hand, after a moment, that odd momentary contact again; Irie can feel his forehead crease in confusion, uncertainty building to overcome even the lulling effect of Byakuran’s touch before he asks “What are you doing?” and reaches up to fumble sleep-clumsy fingers into his hair. He finds resistance, something cool and foreign amid the tangle of the strands, and Byakuran laughs as Irie tugs it free and opens his eyes to blink at a half-crushed flower.

“Flowers suit you, Sho-chan.” There’s another movement, the press of what Irie is realizing now is another blossom into his hair. It’s those that are clouding the air with perfume, too, the white flower in Irie’s fingers spilling sugar-sweet scent out of proportion to its small size.

“Where did you get these?” Irie asks, looking up to watch Byakuran reach out towards the vague shape of a basket on the bedside table.

“I had them delivered an hour ago,” Byakuran says, as if this is a perfectly ordinary thing to do. He reaches for the basket again, comes back with a whole handful of blossoms; they shower down over Irie’s shoulders in a flutter of yellow and white. “Don’t you like them?”

“What are they?” Irie asks, pushing up onto an elbow so he can fumble through the cascade of petals that now surround him.

“Honeysuckle.” Byakuran purrs the word, ruffles his hand up into Irie’s hair and knocks a few of the flowers loose. “They’re sweet.”

“They do smell good,” Irie admits.

“They taste good, too.” Byakuran reaches for one of the blossoms, catches the fragile shape of it between his fingers as gently as if it’s a butterfly. “Here.”

Irie draws back from the offer, glancing up at Byakuran’s face as if he can see clearly enough to distinguish teasing in the other’s eyes, as if clarity of vision would help him read it even if it were there. “What?”

Byakuran’s laugh is clear without any need for sight. “Like this,” he says, and he lifts his hand to his mouth. Irie can’t see what he’s doing; there a shift of movement, a flutter of sound in the form of a sharp inhale, and then Byakuran is leaning in closer, the dark edge of his smile coming into focus as he draws near.

“Open your mouth,” he purrs, suggestion weighting his approach, and Irie is obeying before he can process Byakuran’s motion as what it is. Lips ghost against his, there’s a slick of Byakuran’s tongue at his mouth, and Irie is just giving in to the heat when Byakuran pulls back to leave the sharp-sweet bite of sugar behind.

“It’s the nectar,” Byakuran says while Irie is still trying to steady his breathing around the suddenly frantic thrum of his heartbeat. “Try one.”

“What?” Irie asks, struggling for comprehension he fails to grasp.

There’s another laugh, the sound shivering along Irie’s spine, and then: “Here,” and Byakuran is pressing a flower to his mouth, fitting the end closest to the stem to his lips. “Suck.”

Irie obeys. There’s a catch of air, a moment before he can tighten his mouth to the flower; then the sweet of sugar, the taste honey-bright over his tongue, and Byakuran is purring, “See?” as the flavor radiates out into Irie’s mouth. “Isn’t it good?” He’s reaching for Irie’s hair again, winding his fingers into the strands, and any response Irie might have given is lost to a startled exhale at the friction against his scalp, at the tug of a hand through his hair. Byakuran laughs, strokes sensation out over Irie’s head and against the back of his neck, and by the time he draws his hand away to reach for more flowers Irie is trembling, breathless to the surge of heat in his veins.

“Do you know what honeysuckles stand for?” Byakuran asks while he’s still turned away, his fingers dragging through the basket against the table.

Irie takes a breath, tries to calm the flutter of frightened anticipation in his chest. “No?”

Byakuran turns back. When he reaches out his hands are empty after all, fit in against the sides of Irie’s neck as he swings his feet up onto the bed and turns in to press close against Irie’s body. He’s very warm, like he’s been standing in sunlight, his smile so bright it’s hard to look at.

“It’s for bonds of love,” he says. When he moves in to kiss Irie’s forehead the flowers underneath them crush against the sheets, the air goes briefly fragrant with their perfume. “And devoted affection.”

Irie’s tension turns itself into a laugh, the sound catching a little in the back of his throat as Byakuran’s fingers trail against his shoulder. He gets a hand up, fits his fingers tentatively against Byakuran’s waist. “That’s the first time the meanings have made sense.”

“Sho-chan,” Byakuran purrs, laughter hot against Irie’s skin. “They’ve  _always_  made sense.”

Irie would protest if he could. But Byakuran’s mouth is fitting against his, filling his tongue with the taste of sugar and his veins with electricity, and in the end, he finds, it is easier to surrender.


End file.
